Local Heating in Nanoscale Conductors

By Yu-Chang Chen, Michael Zwolak, M. D. Ventra. 2003

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report first-principles calculations of local heating in nanoscale junctions formed by a single molecule and a gold point contact. Due to the lower current density and larger heat dissipation, the single molecule heats less than the gold point contact. We also find that, at zero temperature, threshold biases, Vonset, of about 6 mV and 11 mV for the molecule and the point contact, respectively, are required to excite the smallest vibrational mode and generate heat. The latter estimate is in very good agreement with recent experimental results on the same system. At a given external bias V below Vonset, heating becomes noticeable when the background temperature is on the order of approximately e(Vonset − V)/kB. Above Vonset, local heating increases dramatically with increasing bias, mainly due to excitation of longitudinal modes, but is also considerably suppressed by thermal dissipation into the electrodes, provided good thermal contacts exist between the nanostructure and the bulk electrodes.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f152916f65fefb23d537931d9b3c472e8bca5a47

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Electron transport in molecular junctions (2006, background): “Current-induced instability and local heating arise from energy exchanged between electrons and phonon”
Energy dissipation and transport in nanoscale devices (2010, background): “Near the limit of zero temperature, an even sharper onset of power dissipation is expected, as soon as the applied voltage is large enough for carriers to emit a single phonon, V ≥ ħωOP/q, as shown for molecular junctions [32-35].”
Molecular transport junctions: vibrational effects (2006, methodology): “The same numerical methodologies have been used also to compute other consequences of inelastic electron transport in nanojunctions, such as mechanical effects including current induced forces [31, 141, 157, 160, 191, 220, 289, 307–315] and junction heating [161, 165, 166, 213, 214].”