There is a significant need for site-specific and on-demand cooling in electronic, optoelectronic and bioanalytical devices, where cooling is currently achieved by the use of bulky and/or over-designed system-level solutions. Thermoelectric devices can address these limitations while also enabling energy-efficient solutions, and significant progress has been made in the development of nanostructured thermoelectric materials with enhanced figures-of-merit. However, fully functional practical thermoelectric coolers have not been made from these nanomaterials due to the enormous difficulties in integrating nanoscale materials into microscale devices and packaged macroscale systems. Here, we show the integration of thermoelectric coolers fabricated from nanostructured Bi2Te3-based thin-film superlattices into state-of-the-art electronic packages. We report cooling of as much as 15 degrees C at the targeted region on a silicon chip with a high ( approximately 1,300 W cm-2) heat flux. This is the first demonstration of viable chip-scale refrigeration technology and has the potential to enable a wide range of currently thermally limited applications.

Single pulse transmissivity and reflectivity of fused silica irradiated by tightly focused 90 fs laser pulses at a center wavelength of 800 nm are numerically and experimentally investigated to study the role of nonlinear photoionization and avalanche ionization processes in free electron generation. The laser beam inside fused silica is modeled with a ͑2+1͒-dimensional propagation equation which considers the effects of laser beam diffraction, group velocity dispersion, self-focusing, defocusing, and absorption due to the free electrons and nonlinear photoionization of the valence electrons. Comparison of our simulation to the experimental data reveals that the avalanche ionization coefficients are much smaller than some previously reported results and that avalanche ionization is of minor importance in generating free electrons in fused silica at the laser fluence levels considered in this study.

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Ultrafast pump-probe experiments were used to study high-intensity ultrafast pulse-ablation dynamics in fused silica. Two laser pulses with varied time delay and pulse energy were used to irradiate fused silica samples and observe the transient reflectivity and transmissivity of the probe pulse. It was seen that the probe reflectivity initially increased due to the formation of free-electron plasma and then dropped to a low value within a period of about 10ps caused by a rapid structural change at the surface. The time-resolved measurements of reflectivity and transmissivity were also related to atomic force microscopy measurements of the depth of the laser-ablated hole. It was seen that the depth peaked at zero delay between the pulses and decreased within a period of about 1ps as the temporal separation between the pulses was increased caused by the screening by the plasma produced by the first pulse. When the temporal separation is about 100ps or longer, evidence for melting and resolidification during double-pulse ablation was also observed in the form of ridges at the circumference of the ablated holes.