Single mode heat rectifier: Controlling energy flow between electronic conductors

Abstract

We study heat transfer between conductors, mediated by the excitation of a monomodal harmonic oscillator. Using a simple model, we show that the onset of rectification in the system is directly related to the nonlinearity of the electron gas dispersion relation. When the metals have strictly linear dispersion relation a Landauer type expression for the thermal current holds, symmetric with respect to the temperature difference. Rectification becomes prominent when deviations from linear dispersion exist, and the fermionic model cannot be mapped into a harmonic- bosonized- representation. The effects described here are relevant for understanding radiative heat transfer and vibrational energy flow in electrically insulating molecular junctions.

References in corpus (2)

• Thermal Logic Gates: Computation with phonons
• Normal metal - superconductor tunnel junction as a Brownian refrigerator

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Heat Transport in low-dimensional systems
• Quantum thermal transport in nanostructures
• Thermal memory: a storage of phononic information
• Sufficient conditions for thermal rectification in hybrid quantum structures
• Thermal rectification in nonlinear quantum circuits
• Stochastic pumping of heat: Approaching the Carnot efficiency
• Heat flux operator, current conservation and the formal Fourier's law
• Asymptotic non-equilibrium steady state operators