Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Poor heat dissipation is one of the fundamental limiters of device performance and strongly influences device failure. In highly integrated electronic devices such as lasers, transistors and sensors, high current densities generate intense localized heat that can not only alter material properties, but also lead to irreversible structural changes. Mitigating these effects at the macroscopic scale has allowed the commercialization of ever more capable electronic, photonic and data storage systems. However, at the microscopic device level the presence of interfaces, insulators or geometric confinement pose severe limitations to our ability to dispose waste heat and evolve technologies that are central to computing systems, communication systems, and manufacturing. In our increasingly more digital lifestyles, our reliance on ever growing amounts of digital information will greatly benefit from radical shifts in the way data is processed, stored and communicated that goes beyond today's economies of scale. In other words, revolutionary improvements in electronic devices will allow faster technological progress with fewer incremental resources. The study of nanoscale heat transport can therefore affect a myriad of applications. The scientific community is still developing an understanding of the processes driving heat transport at the nanoscale, where microscopic processes such as non-classical energy transfer, interaction between electrons and crystal vibrations and finite size effects become important. While important challenges in the field remain, such as how to alleviate the heat dissipation bottleneck in electronic devices, an intriguing question surfaces: how can we exploit the different way heat conducts at the nanoscale to our advantage? The emergence of new classes of materials such as 2-dimensional crystals, organic/inorganic nanoscale composites and atomically layered metal compounds are presenting opportunities for different devices based on their electronic and magnetic properties and are also very interesting due to their highly directional heat transport, which can be used to channel heat where convenient. Non-classical phenomena can limit the dissipation of heat, but recently it was shown that in some cases an enhancement is possible. The study of crystals with highly directional and non-classical energy transport can therefore provide an unprecedented tuning knob for opto-electronic devices, sensing, energy harvesting and data storage technologies. The proposed research will address heat transport challenges and opportunities for photonic devices, next generation data storage technologies, devices and materials composted of 2-dimensional crystals. This work will leverage existing international collaborations with academia and the data storage industry. The impact of this work will in the long run transform our rapidly growing electronic, computing and telecommunications infrastructure.