Lunch will be provided first and the talk will start at 12pm.
This is the second installment of the CU Phonon Club, a new group that focuses on making connections between different research teams on campus studying phonons.
Abstract: Understanding energy transport, conversion and dissipation processes at the fundamental atomic and molecular level is of great interest for creating efficient renewable energy materials and new quantum thermal devices. In this talk, I will describe our recent efforts in developing highly sensitive experimental tools to systematically address long-standing questions regarding heat transport and thermoelectric energy conversion at the extreme length scales. Specifically, by leveraging custom developed scanning thermal probe microscopy with ultra-high power (picowatt) and spatial (angstrom) resolution, we have observed the room temperature quantization of electronic heat conduction in single-atom junctions. Furthermore, the same technical advance has allowed us to study thermal transport in single molecules for the first time and quantify heat conductance due to the thermal phonon transmission at the atomic scale. Finally, I will describe a novel thermoelectric characterization platform that enables the combined measurement of Peltier cooling, electronic, and thermal properties in molecular junctions.