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Abstract. Understanding and controlling vibrations in condensed matter is emerging as an essential necessity both at fundamental level and for the development of a broad variety of technological applications. Intelligent design of the band structure and transport properties of phonons at the nanoscale and of their interactions with electrons and photons impact the efficiency of nanoelectronic systems and thermoelectric materials, permit the exploration of quantum phenomena with micro-and nanoscale resonators, and provide new tools for spectroscopy and imaging. In this colloquium we assess the state of the art of nanophononics, describing the recent achievements and the open challenges in nanoscale heat transport, coherent phonon generation and exploitation, and in nano-and optomechanics. We also underline the links among the diverse communities involved in the study of nanoscale phonons, pointing out the common goals and opportunities.

Researchers explore loosely overdamped system with extreme low stiffness for nanoparticle sorting with nanometer precision.

Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) has been extensively used to study thermal transport at various length scales in many materials. In this method, two local thermostats at different temperatures are used to generate a nonequilibrium steady state with a constant heat flux. Conventionally, the thermal conductivity of a finite system is calculated as the ratio between the heat flux and the temperature gradient extracted from the linear part of the temperature profile away from the local thermostats. Here we show that, with a proper choice of the thermostat, the nonlinear part of the temperature profile should actually not be excluded in thermal transport calculations. We compare NEMD results against those from the atomistic Green's function method in the ballistic regime, and those from the homogeneous nonequilibrium molecular dynamics method in the ballistic-to-diffusive regime. These comparisons suggest that in all the transport regimes, one should directly calculate the thermal conductance from the temperature difference between the heat source and sink and, if needed, convert it to the thermal conductivity by multiplying it with the system length. Furthermore, we find that the Langevin thermostat outperforms the Nosé-Hoover (chain) thermostat in NEMD simulations because of its stochastic and local nature. We show that this is particularly important for studying asymmetric carbon-based nanostructures, for which the Nosé-Hoover thermostat can produce artifacts leading to unphysical thermal rectification. Our findings are important to obtain correct results from molecular dynamics simulations of nanoscale heat transport as the accuracy of the interatomic potentials is rapidly improving. :1905.11024v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall] arXiv

The high thermal conductivity of graphene and few-layer graphene undergoes severe degradations through contact with the substrate. Here we show experimentally that the thermal management of a micro heater is substantially improved by introducing alternative heat-escaping channels into a graphene-based film bonded to functionalized graphene oxide through amino-silane molecules. Using a resistance temperature probe for in situ monitoring we demonstrate that the hotspot temperature was lowered by ∼28 °C for a chip operating at 1,300 W cm−2. Thermal resistance probed by pulsed photothermal reflectance measurements demonstrated an improved thermal coupling due to functionalization on the graphene–graphene oxide interface. Three functionalization molecules manifest distinct interfacial thermal transport behaviour, corroborating our atomistic calculations in unveiling the role of molecular chain length and functional groups. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that the functionalization constrains the cross-plane phonon scattering, which in turn enhances in-plane heat conduction of the bonded graphene film by recovering the long flexural phonon lifetime.

The previous model on surface free energy has been extended to calculate size dependent thermodynamic properties (i.e., melting temperature, melting enthalpy, melting entropy, evaporation temperature, Curie temperature, Debye temperature and specific heat capacity) of nanoparticles. According to the quantitative calculation of size effects on the calculated thermodynamic properties, it is found that most thermodynamic properties of nanoparticles vary linearly with 1/D as a first approximation. In other words, the size dependent thermodynamic properties P(n) have the form of P(n) = P(b)(1 -K/D), in which P(b) is the corresponding bulk value and K is the material constant. This may be regarded as a scaling law for most of the size dependent thermodynamic properties for different materials. The present predictions are consistent literature values.

Particle trapping and binding in optical potential wells provide a versatile platform for various biomedical applications. However, implementation systems to study multi-particle contact interactions in an optical lattice remain rare. By configuring an optofluidic lattice, we demonstrate the precise control of particle interactions and functions such as controlling aggregation and multi-hopping. The mean residence time of a single particle is found considerably reduced from 7 s, as predicted by Kramer’s theory, to 0.6 s, owing to the mechanical interactions among aggregated particles. The optofluidic lattice also enables single-bacteria-level screening of biological binding agents such as antibodies through particle-enabled bacteria hopping. The binding efficiency of antibodies could be determined directly, selectively, quantitatively and efficiently. This work enriches the fundamental mechanisms of particle kinetics and offers new possibilities for probing and utilising unprecedented biomolecule interactions at single-bacteria level.

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