ABSTRACT
Heat transport at the micro/nanoscale is very important for several nanotechnology applications, ranging from micro/nanoelectronics to bioegineering and energy harvesting. Management of heat transfer is crucial for reliability lifetime and maintenance of functionality of nanoscale devices. Possible applications for thermal rectification are thermal diodes, thermal transistors which will switch or amplify heat current, thermal memories and thermal logic gates. The rapid emergence of phononics makes possible the use of phonons to carry and process information, besides electrons and photons. Nanophononic crystals are new interesting structures for ther- moelectric applications as their thermal conductivity can be very low they are the elastic analogues of photonic crystals. Such systems are generally obtained by patterning cylindrical pores into a bulk crystalline semiconductor or more often into membrane, and less frequently by nano-inclusions. A control of the mechanisms that drive nanobubble production is thus an important issue for all the applications.
