Publication Date:
2015-05-16
Description:
Author(s): Riccardo Bosisio, Stefano Valentini, Francesco Mazza, Giuliano Benenti, Rosario Fazio, Vittorio Giovannetti, and Fabio Taddei The overheating of microprocessors components is currently the most limiting factor in the development of information technology. This motivates the concern in finding innovative ways to control and evacuate heat in nanoscale devices. In the presence of a magnetic field B, the heat currents flowing through a generic setup exhibit reversible and irreversible components: the former are reversed when inverting B→-B, whereas the latter remain unchanged. In this work the authors exploit this feature to propose a magnetic thermal switch: a setup which allows control of the heat flow by making use of an external magnetic field as a selector of a desired working configuration. Several features, like switching on/off, inversion, partition and swap of the heat currents, can be implemented in a programmable device allowing full controllability. Among the advantages of this approach are the absence of any temperature constraints and the possibility to control phononic, in addition to electronic, heat flows. [Phys. Rev. B 91, 205420] Published Thu May 14, 2015
Keywords:
Surface physics, nanoscale physics, low-dimensional systems
Print ISSN:
1098-0121
Electronic ISSN:
1095-3795
Topics:
Physics
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