What is it about?

Today, while electrons and photons are well-controlled at the nanoscale, phonons (heat carriers) are almost propagating without control. This article shows that nanostructures made of radial arrays of air holes drilled in a silicon membrane can guide the phonons to create nanoscale hot spots. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that the designed nanostructures have very good performance as they effectively guide more than 70% of the phonons towards the hot spot.

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Why is it important?

We explore different designs to define rules on how the size and intensity of the hot spot can be tuned to meet specific requirements. Our findings show the importance of the nanostructure's design to guide phonons and provide strategies to control the heat flow at the nanoscale.

Perspectives

The nanostructures were designed taking into account realistic dimensions given today's nanofabrication technology. We hope this article will encourage other groups to perform experiments to test our simulations.

Dr. Aymeric Ramiere
Shenzhen University

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This page is a summary of: Design of thermal lens phononic nanostructure to generate tunable hotspots using quasi-ballistic phonon transport, Journal of Applied Physics, May 2022, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0080599.
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