Coulomb-mediated single-electron heat transfer statistics across capacitively coupled silicon nanodots

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates Coulomb-mediated heat transfer between silicon nanodots at the single-electron level, providing statistical insights into nanoscale thermodynamics and validating universal nonequilibrium relations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify Coulomb-mediated heat transfer statistics using single-electron dynamics in coupled silicon nanodots, advancing understanding of nanoscale thermodynamics.

Findings

Measured Coulomb interaction strength via cross-correlation of electron dynamics

Converted single-electron dynamics into heat transfer statistics

Observed net-zero heat transfer at equilibrium

Abstract

Heat transfer mediated by the Coulomb interaction reveals unconventional thermodynamic behavior and broadens thermodynamics research into fields such as quantum dynamics and information engineering. Although some experimental demonstrations of phenomena utilizing Coulomb-mediated heat transfer have been reported, estimations of their performance, such as efficiency, and their theoretical evaluations necessitate qualitative evaluation of the transfer mechanism itself, which remains challenging. We present an experiment investigating single-electron dynamics in two electrostatically coupled silicon nanodots to quantify Coulomb-mediated heat transfer at the nanoscale. By estimating the Coulomb interaction strength between the dots using the cross-correlation measurements of the single-electron dynamics, we convert the single-electron dynamics into the statistics of Coulomb-mediated heat transfer. Conducting the experiment at equilibrium enabled us to obtain a fluctuating net-zero heat transfer between the dots. These heat transfer statistics are essential for exploring device functionalities from the perspective of stochastic thermodynamics and for verifying universal relations in nonequilibrium states.