Opportunities for mesoscopics in thermometry and refrigeration: Physics and applications

By Francesco Giazotto, T. Heikkilä, A. Luukanen, Alexander M. Savin, Jukka P. Pekola. 2005

821 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This review presents an overview of the thermal properties of mesoscopic structures. The discussion is based on the concept of electron energy distribution, and, in particular, on controlling and probing it. The temperature of an electron gas is determined by this distribution: refrigeration is equivalent to narrowing it, and thermometry is probing its convolution with a function characterizing the measuring device. Temperature exists, strictly speaking, only in quasiequilibrium in which the distribution follows the Fermi-Dirac form. Interesting nonequilibrium deviations can occur due to slow relaxation rates of the electrons, e.g., among themselves or with lattice phonons. Observation and applications of nonequilibrium phenomena are also discussed. The focus in this paper is at low temperatures, primarily below $4\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{K}$, where physical phenomena on mesoscopic scales and hybrid combinations of various types of materials, e.g., superconductors, normal metals, insulators, and doped semiconductors, open up a rich variety of device concepts. This review starts with an introduction to theoretical concepts and experimental results on thermal properties of mesoscopic structures. Then thermometry and refrigeration are examined with an emphasis on experiments. An immediate application of solid-state refrigeration and thermometry is in ultrasensitive radiation detection, which is discussed in depth. This review concludes with a summary of pertinent fabrication methods of presented devices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7f9718b3edadb228000446a746b8141fd8fa39a

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum-enhanced measurements without entanglement (2017, background): “Thermal probes are crucial for both fundamental issues and technological applications (Benedict, 1984; Childs, 2001; Giazotto et al., 2006).”
Single-electron current sources: towards a refined definition of ampere (2012, background): “The relaxation rates decrease rapidly with decreasing temperature, e.g., ∝ T 5 for electron-phonon relaxation in an ordinary metal – see, e.g. (Giazotto et al., 2006).”
Colloquium : Nonequilibrium effects in superconductors with a spin-splitting field (2017, methodology): “(49) Here Σ = 3072ζ(5)νF k 5 Bgeph describes the materials dependent magnitude of the electron-phonon coupling [see tabulated values in (Giazotto et al., 2006)] typically used for heat flow, and ζ(x) is the Riemann zeta function.”
Quantum Simulators: Architectures and Opportunities (2019, background): “[29] Francesco Giazotto, Tero T Heikkilä, Arttu Luukanen, Alexander M Savin, and Jukka P”
Towards quantum thermodynamics in electronic circuits (2015, background): “In this way, evaporative cooling of electrodes can be achieved in both superconducting [3, 4] and semiconducting [5] hybrid structures.”
Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale (2016, background): “In general the electron-electron scattering length scales with a lower power of temperature than the electronphonon scattering length, for details see [37, 38].”