Coherent Manipulation of Thermal Transport by Tunable Electron-Photon and Electron-Phonon Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tunable system for controlling thermal transport between reservoirs via electron-photon and electron-phonon interactions, enabling large temperature modulations and high efficiency at low temperatures.

Contribution

It presents a novel scheme using a phase-tunable resonator with graphene reservoirs to coherently manipulate thermal transport at cryogenic temperatures.

Findings

Achieves temperature modulations up to 245 mK

Transmittance reaches 99%

Energy conversion efficiency up to 50%

Abstract

We propose a system where coherent thermal transport between two reservoirs in non-galvanic contact is modulated by independently tuning the electron-photon and the electron-phonon coupling. The scheme is based on two gate-controlled electrodes capacitively coupled through a dc-SQUID as intermediate phase-tunable resonator. Thereby the electron-photon interaction is modulated by controlling the flux threading the dc-SQUID and the impedance of the two reservoirs, while the electron-phonon coupling is tuned by controlling the charge carrier concentration in the electrodes. To quantitatively evaluate the behavior of the system we propose to exploit graphene reservoirs. In this case, the scheme can work at temperatures reaching 1 K, with unprecedented temperature modulations as large as 245 mK, transmittance up to 99% and energy conversion efficiency up to 50%. Finally, the accuracy of heat transport control allows to use this system as an experimental tool to determine the electron-phonon coupling in two dimensional electronic systems (2DES).