Modeling the effect of transient violations of the second law of thermodynamics on heat transfer in silicon nanowire

TL;DR

This paper models how transient violations of the second law of thermodynamics affect heat transfer in silicon nanowires, revealing challenges in cooling nanoscale objects and identifying a transition in heat transfer behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a Poisson process-based model to study the impact of thermodynamic law violations on nanoscale heat transfer, a novel approach in this context.

Findings

Difficulty in cooling nanoscale objects to bath temperature

Transition from power law to exponential behavior in heat transfer

Inverse square law dependence of fluctuations on number of sites

Abstract

Violations of the second law of thermodynamics for small systems well below the thermodynamic limit has already been experimentally observed. However, the effects of such violations on experimentally measurable quantities have not been studied in detail. Here we report the effect of transient violations, i.e., spontaneous transfer of heat from cold to hot objects, on heat transfer in silicon nanowire by modeling the violations as a Poisson process. Our modeling and simulations show that it is increasingly difficult to cool down the nanoscale objects to the bath temperature, there is a transition from power law to exponential behavior, and the fluctuations have inverse square law dependence on number of sites.