Photon heat transport in low-dimensional nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper develops a nonequilibrium Green's function approach to analyze photon-mediated thermal transport in low-dimensional nanostructures, revealing quantized conductance and the role of current noise.

Contribution

It introduces a microscopic method to calculate photon heat transport in nanostructures, including a formal expression for energy current and its generalization to nonequilibrium conditions.

Findings

Derived a formally exact expression for energy current.

Demonstrated quantized thermal conductance.

Showed the influence of electron current noise on energy transfer.

Abstract

At low temperatures when the phonon modes are effectively frozen, photon transport is the dominating mechanism of thermal relaxation in metallic systems. Starting from a microscopic many-body Hamiltonian, we develop a nonequilibrium Green's function method to study energy transport by photons in nanostructures. A formally exact expression for the energy current between a metallic island and a one-dimensional electromagnetic field is obtained. From this expression we derive the quantized thermal conductance as well as show how the results can be generalized to nonequilibrium situations. Generally, the frequency-dependent current noise of the island electrons determines the energy transfer rate.