Powerful and efficient energy harvester with resonant-tunneling quantum dots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nanoscale heat engine using resonant tunneling in quantum dots, achieving high efficiency and power for thermal energy harvesting, scalable through layered structures.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum-dot-based heat engine design with tunable energy transfer, outperforming existing nano-engines in power and efficiency.

Findings

Optimized quantum-dot heat engine surpasses existing nano-engines in power and efficiency.

Layered structures maintain high performance despite quantum dot randomness.

The system enables scalable thermal energy harvesting at the nanoscale.

Abstract

We propose a nanoscale heat engine that utilizes the physics of resonant tunneling in quantum dots in order to transfer electrons only at specific energies. The nanoengine converts heat into electrical current in a multiterminal geometry which permits one to separate current and heat flows. By putting two quantum dots in series with a hot cavity, electrons that enter one lead are forced to gain a prescribed energy in order to exit the opposite lead, transporting a single electron charge. This condition yields an ideally efficient heat engine. The energy gain is a property of the composite system rather than of the individual dots. It is therefore tunable to optimize the power while keeping a much larger level spacing for the individual quantum dots. Despite the simplicity of the physical model, the optimized rectified current and power is larger than any other candidate nano-engine. The ability to scale the power by putting many such engines into a two-dimensional layered structure gives a paradigmatic system for harvesting thermal energy at the nanoscale. We demonstrate that the high power and efficiency of the layered structure persists even if the quantum dots exhibit some randomness.