Breakthrough in understanding heat transport with a chain of gold atoms
(PHYSorg.com Nanotechnology)

The precise control of electron transport in microelectronics makes complex logic circuits possible that are in daily use in smartphones and laptops. Heat transport is of similar fundamental importance and its control is for instance necessary to efficiently cool the ever smaller chips. An international team including theoretical physicists from Konstanz, Junior Professor Fabian Pauly and Professor Peter Nielaba and their staff, has achieved a real breakthrough in better understanding heat transport at the nanoscale. The team used a system that experimentalists in nanoscience can nowadays realize quite routinely and keeps serving as the `fruit fly` for breakthrough discoveries: a chain of gold atoms. They used it to demonstrate the quantization of the electronic part of the thermal conductance. The study also shows that the Wiedemann-Franz law, a relation from classical physics, remains valid down to the atomic level. The results were published in the scientific journal Science on 16 February 2017.