Enhancing nanoscale heat transport in novel materials and electronic devices

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Electronic equipment accounts for a significant fraction of our rapidly increasing global demand for energy and it is projected to consume 30% of our energy budget in 10 years. Improving the energy efficiency in electronic devices such as the transistor at the computing core of data centers, or the light-emitting diode that will become pervasive in lighting applications, can have a remarkable influence on a country’s future economy and environmental impact. Heat transport has profound effects on the energy efficiency, performance and reliability of electronic devices. Particularly at the nanoscale, heat flow is greatly affected by low-dimensionality, device geometry and the presence of interfaces across materials with dissimilar phonon spectra. As device size is reduced or more functionality is added, the quality and number of interfaces that pose as barriers to heat flow have greater impact, and understanding their role can lead to ways to engineer energy-efficient devices. On a fundamental level, knowledge of how heat flow affects electronic transport phenomena can drive the discovery of new functionality. The proposed research aims to answer the following questions: how is heat transported in novel materials that may be used in future electronic devices? How can interfaces be tailored to improve cooling efficiency? How can one probe heat transport at the nanoscale? Answering these questions can in the long term shape the functionality and energy use of the evolving electronics landscape. Versatile optical pump-probe techniques have emerged to investigate heat transport in materials, interfaces and composites. In the short term we will adopt and extend these techniques to make them sensitive to heat transport over a large range of heat transport length scales, in order to span the diffusive to the quasi-ballistic limits. Additionally, electrical thermometry will allow us to probe devices locally. These tools will be applied to the study of heat flow in: (i) emerging 2-dimensional electronic materials, (ii) nanoscale composites with high thermal anisotropy, (iii) magnetic junctions used in magnetic field sensors and magnetic random access memories. The impact of this work will benefit Canada’s economy in the short term through the training of highly qualified personnel and raising the profile of the country’s university research work. Furthermore, research on thermal anisotropy in composites has immediate applications in the data storage industry, and can contribute directly to progress in hard disk drive products. In the long run this research program will improve the performance, energy efficiency and environmental impact of the world’s rapidly growing electronic, computing and telecommunications infrastructure.