Welcome to this Nanoscience Colloquium with Prof. Anne Anthore

Talk title: Quantum heat transport and Coulomb interactions

Abstract

A. Anthore, E. Sivre, H. Duprez, F. D. Parmentier, A. Cavanna, U. Gennser, A. Ouerghi, Y. Jin and F. Pierre

Quantum mechanics and Coulomb interaction rule heat and charge transport in small circuits, giving rise to many-body phenomena (Coulomb blockade, Luttinger liquids, Kondo effect…). Whereas many experiments address electrical properties, consequences on thermal transport remain barely explored.
In this colloquium, I will present how heat transport measurements allow us to investigate the quantum of thermal conductance1, a very fundamental quantity, and to evidence how Coulomb interactions can drastically reduce the heat flow2 without influencing the charge flow. Due to the link between heat, entropy and information, the same mechanism can result in transmitting the electronic quantum states through a micrometer-size metallic island3, realizing a form of electron teleportation, as demonstrated in 4.

The image above is a colorized SEM image of an hybrid metal-semiconductor circuits. When heating up the (red) metallic island, the heat flow is inferred from the measurements of current fluctuations.

Besides the direct thermal consequences for the quantum engineering of nano-electronic devices, these experiments are a first step towards exploiting heat as a revealing probe of intriguing phenomena, complementary to electricity.

[1] e.g. L. Rego, Phys. Rev. B 59, 13080 (1999); S. Jezouin et al., Science 342, 601 (2013)
[2] E. Sivre et al., Nat. Phys. 14, 145 (2018)
[3] A. Clerk et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 186801 (2001) ; Idrisov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 026802 (2018)
[4] H. Duprez et al., Science 366, 1243 (2019)