- 18.12.2015 -
Nanoscale phase engineering of electronic thermal currents
Researchers from NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR and Scuola Normale Superiore, realized the building block to demonstrate the exact correspondence in the phase engineering of charge and heat transport, breaking ground for advanced caloritronic nanodevices. The result is published on Nature Nanotechnology.
The Coherent Caloritronics group, coordinated by Francesco Giazotto, has already showed the existence of a phase-coherent component (i.e., tunable for instance with a magnetic flux) of thermal currents flowing between two temperature-biased superconductors [1]. Now this new achievement opens the way to the realization of advanced caloritronic devices, such as thermal splitters, heat pumps and time-dependent electronic engines. The latter are expected to become key tools in a huge number of low-temperature circuits, in order to achieve an accurate energy control for quantum computing, solid state cooling, radiation detection and thermal logic.
The device consists in a double loop Josephson modulator able to provide large magnetic-flux-driven temperature oscillations and a full control over the coherent heat current component. The modulator is robust against unavoidable structure asymmetries and offers the possibility to obtain exotic thermal interference patterns with an enhanced sensitivity to magnetic flux variations.
Nanoscale phase engineering of thermal transport with a Josephson heat modulator, A. Fornieri, C. Blanc, R. Bosisio, S. D'Ambrosio, F. Giazotto
Nature Nanotechnology, (2015), doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.281
Link http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2015.281.html