A great week for mesoscopic thermoelectrics - continued

The great week continues! Today, Physical Review Letters published a second experiment by the Worschech group of Würzburg, Germany that realized our theoretical model of current rectification in a chaotic cavity geometry using energy-dependent transmission functions. The Letter was featured by the editors, and also has a write up in Physics.

The photo to the right is a false-color image of the sample used to implement the voltage-noise rectification. The upper conductor has the energy-dependent transmissions, and playes the role of a ratchet and pawl in the nano-engine. The lower conductor displays excess noise, and gives thermal energy to the upper conductor, which rectifies it into a directed current.

In other news, I just posted a new paper on the arXiv together with Karyn Le Hur and Loic Henriet, both from the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris.

This paper also looks at the possibility of rectification, but considers the asymmetry of quantum vacuum fluctuations as the nonlinear element. More on this when it is published.