Acoustic Phonon Tunneling and Heat Transport due to Evanescent Electric Fields

Abstract

The authors describe how acoustic phonons can directly tunnel through vacuum and, therefore, transmit energy and conduct heat between bodies that are separated by a vacuum gap. This effect is enabled by introducing a coupling mechanism, such as piezoelectricity, that strongly couples electric field and lattice deformation. The electric field leaks into the vacuum as an evanescent field, which leads to finite solid-vacuum-solid transmission probability. Due to strong resonances in the system some phonons can go through the vacuum gap with (or close to) unity transmission, which leads to significant thermal conductance and heat flux.

arXiv commentmain text, 3 figures, supplementary material

References in corpus (3)

• Surface Electromagnetic Waves Thermally Excited: Radiative Heat Transfer, Coherence Properties and Casimir Forces Revisited in the Near Field
• Near-field heat transfer in a scanning thermal microscope
• Near-field radiative heat transfer between a sphere and a substrate

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Ultrafast Radiative Heat Transfer
• Radiative Heat Transfer between Neighboring Particles
• Classical to quantum transition of near-field heat transfer between two nanoparticles
• Vacuum induced phonon transfer between two solid dielectric materials: Illustrating the case of Casimir force coupling
• Thermal balance and quantum heat transport in nanostructures thermalized by local Langevin heat baths
• Extreme Near-Field Heat Transfer Between Gold Surfaces
• Atomistic simulation of phonon heat transport across metallic nanogaps
• Violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law in the Topological Kondo model
• Contribution of the acoustic waves to near-field heat transfer
• First-principles calculations of phonon transport across a vacuum gap
• Electric double layer effect in an extreme near-field heat transfer between metal surfaces
• Thermal conduction and interface effects in nanoscale Fermi-Pasta-Ulam conductors
• Conduction-radiation coupling between two closely-separated solids
• Atomistic modeling of extreme near-field heat transport across nanogaps between two polar dielectric materials
• Extreme near-field heat transfer between silica surfaces
• On anomalously large nano-scale heat transfer between metals
• Complete tunneling of acoustic waves between closely spaced piezoelectric crystals
• Interlayer Heat Transfer in Bilayer Carrier Systems
• Thermoelectric response enhanced by surface/edge states in physical nanogaps
• Tunneling of Elastic Waves in a Tapered Waveguide