A great week for mesoscopic thermoelectrics

Post date: Apr 8, 2015 6:15:26 PM

Several good things have been happening scientifically in nano-scale thermoelectrics. My paper on chiral thermoelectrics with quantum Hall physics I discussed earlier was published today in Physical Review Letters.

Also, an earlier theory published with the same collaborators and the late Markus Buttiker was confirmed by the group of Christian Glattli, at the Service de Physique de l'Etat Condense at the CEA Saclay France in a beautiful paper published in Nature Communications, Harvesting dissipated energy with a mesoscopic ratchet

The experiment was to have a chaotic cavity coupled to two quantum point contacts with nonlinear, energy-dependent, transmission functions. A nearby heat source creates extra voltage fluctuations, which when capacitively coupled to the device, creates a rectified current. The experiment agrees beautifully with our theory.

Here is a false-color image of the sample the experiment uses.