Mosso Nico, Drechsler Ute, Menges Fabian, Nirmalraj Peter, Karg Siegfried, Riel Heike, Gotsmann Bernd
IBM Research - Zurich, Säumerstrasse 4, 8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland.
Nat Nanotechnol. 2017 May;12(5):430-433. doi: 10.1038/nnano.2016.302. Epub 2017 Feb 6.
Heat transport and dissipation at the nanoscale severely limit the scaling of high-performance electronic devices and circuits. Metallic atomic junctions serve as model systems to probe electrical and thermal transport down to the atomic level as well as quantum effects that occur in one-dimensional (1D) systems. Whereas charge transport in atomic junctions has been studied intensively in the past two decades, heat transport remains poorly characterized because it requires the combination of a high sensitivity to small heat fluxes and the formation of stable atomic contacts. Here we report heat-transfer measurements through atomic junctions and analyse the thermal conductance of single-atom gold contacts at room temperature. Simultaneous measurements of charge and heat transport reveal the proportionality of electrical and thermal conductance, quantized with the respective conductance quanta. This constitutes a verification of the Wiedemann-Franz law at the atomic scale.
纳米尺度下的热传输和耗散严重限制了高性能电子器件和电路的缩放比例。金属原子结作为模型系统，用于探究直至原子尺度的电传输和热传输，以及一维（1D）系统中出现的量子效应。尽管在过去二十年中对原子结中的电荷传输进行了深入研究，但热传输的特征仍然很不明确，因为它需要对小热通量具有高灵敏度并形成稳定的原子接触。在此，我们报告了通过原子结进行的热传递测量，并分析了室温下单原子金接触的热导率。电荷和热传输的同步测量揭示了电导率和热导率的比例关系，并分别用量子化的电导量子进行了量化。这构成了在原子尺度上对维德曼-夫兰兹定律的验证。
