Accelerating the heat diffusion: fast thermal relaxation of a microcantilever

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to significantly speed up thermal relaxation in microcantilevers using a tailored laser heating protocol, achieving up to 30 times faster thermal steady state compared to natural relaxation.

Contribution

The authors develop and experimentally validate a generic approach to accelerate thermal diffusion in 1D objects, surpassing mechanical relaxation timescales.

Findings

Thermal relaxation can be accelerated up to 30 times using tailored laser protocols.

The experimental results agree well with theoretical predictions.

The method enables faster thermal steady states in micro-scale systems.

Abstract

In most systems, thermal diffusion is intrinsically slow with respect to mechanical relaxation. We devise here a generic approach to accelerate the relaxation of the temperature field of a 1D object, in order to beat the mechanical time scales. This approach is applied to a micro-meter sized silicon cantilever, locally heated by a laser beam. A tailored driving protocol for the laser power is derived to quickly reach the thermal stationary state. The model is implemented experimentally yielding a significant acceleration of the thermal relaxation, up to a factor 30. An excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions is reported. This strategy allows a thermal steady state to be reached significantly faster than the natural mechanical relaxation.