Origin of negative differential thermal resistance in a chain of two weakly coupled nonlinear lattices

Abstract

Negative differential resistance in electronic conduction has been extensively studied, but it is not the case for its thermal counterpart, namely, negative differential thermal resistance (NDTR). We present a classical Landauer formula in which the nonlinearity is incorporated by the self-consistent phonon theory in order to study the heat flux across a chain consisting of two weakly coupled lattices. Two typical nonlinear models of hard and soft on-site potentials are discussed, respectively. It is shown that the nonlinearity has strong impacts on the occurring of NDTR. As a result, a transition from the absence to the presence of NDTR is observed. The origin of NDTR consists in the competition between the temperature difference, which acts as an external field, and the temperature-dependent thermal boundary conductance. Finally, the onset of the transition is clearly illustrated for this model. Our analytical calculation agrees reasonably well with numerical simulations.

6 pages, 8 figues

References in corpus (5)

• Heat Transport in low-dimensional systems
• Thermal Logic Gates: Computation with phonons
• Origin of negative differential resistance in a strongly coupled single molecule-metal junction device
• Thermal conductivity of anharmonic lattices: Effective phonons and quantum corrections
• Negative differential thermal resistance induced by ballistic transport

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Double negative differential thermal resistance induced by the nonlinear on-site potentials
• Thermal rectification and negative differential thermal conductance in harmonic chains with nonlinear system-bath coupling
• Dimension dependence of negative differential thermal resistance in graphene nanoribbons
• Strong system-bath coupling induces negative differential thermal conductance and heat amplification in nonequilibrium two-qubits systems
• Quantum thermal transport through anharmonic systems: A self-consistent approach
• Anomalous interfacial temperature profile induced by phonon localization
• Thermally driven classical Heisenberg chain with a spatially varying magnetic field: Thermal rectification and Negative differential thermal resistance