MRS Symposium T: Nanoscale Heat Transport─From Fundamentals to Devices

Heat conduction in solid materials is typically controlled by the transport of phonons or electrons with intrinsic mean-free paths on the scale of 1-100 nm. The thermal phonon wavelength in semiconductor materials at room temperature is of the order of 1-2 nm. In nanostructured materials, nanoscale devices, and lithographically defined nanostructures, structural-length scales overlap with these intrinsic-length scales; and, therefore, the mechanisms of thermal transport are strongly modified. Heat transfer of fluid suspensions of nanoparticles is even more challenging, which involves thermal conduction in nanoparticles, in fluid, and at the fluid-particle interface. The characterization and control of nanoscale thermal transport, however, is far from complete. Relatively little is known about the thermal properties of solid-solid or solid-liquid interfaces; phonon dispersion in nanostructures of the sizes comparable to the thermal phonon wavelength; the relative importance of the many possible phonon scattering processes in nanostructures; and thermal transport in soft matter, including heating of biomolecules for manipulation of their functionality. Topics of interest include: • Thermal conductance of interfaces, nanocrystals, composites, and foams • Nanofluids and colloids • Soft condensed matter, biological or bio-inspired materials, and applications to medical therapies • Heat transport in thermoelectric materials and devices • Measurement science for nanoscale thermal and mass transport • Heat in micro-electronic, -fluidic, and -mechanical devices • Nanoscale phonon imaging and characterization, Raman scattering, and electron-phonon interaction • Thermal imaging of microelectronics • Modeling and theory of heat transport at nanoscale, including atomic to continuum-level descriptions A joint session with Symposium N: Materials and Devices for Thermal-to-Electric Energy Conversion is being considered.