Giant Quantum Freezing of Tunnel Junctions mediated by Environments

Abstract

We investigate the quantum heat exchange between a nanojunction and a many-body or electromagnetic environment far from equilibrium. It is shown that the two-temperature energy emission-absorption mechanism gives rise to a giant heat flow between the junction and the environment. We obtain analytical results for the heat flow in an idealized high impedance environment and perform numerical calculations for the general case of interacting electrons and discuss the giant freezing and heating effects in the junction under typical experimental conditions.

4 pages, 4 figures; supplementary material included as additional pdf-file; http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.84.235101

References in corpus (5)

• Single-mode heat conduction by photons
• Normal metal - superconductor tunnel junction as a Brownian refrigerator
• Hierarchical energy relaxation in mesoscopic tunnel junctions: Effect of nonequilibrium environment on low-temperature transport
• Single grain heating due to inelastic cotunneling
• Heating Effects in a Chain of Quantum Dots

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Thermodynamic and quantum bounds on nonlinear DC thermoelectric transport
• Defining the effective temperature of a quantum driven system from current-current correlation functions
• Interplay of charge and heat transport in a nano-junction in the out-of-equilibrium cotunneling regime
• Localization-Delocalization Transition and Current Fractalization