Real-Time thermotronics: handling fluctuations, dynamics and dissipation for smart radiative thermal management
Thermotronics is a developing discipline that offers promising options to manage heat sources and proposes new ways of exploiting signals encoded by heat. Analogously to what happens in electronic components in which electric currents flow as a consequence of potential differences, thermotronic components are devices in which heat currents flow due to applied temperature differences. In radiative components, thermal photons flow as electrons flow in their electronic counterparts. Among these devices, a radiative thermal transistor controls the heat exchange without contact between a source and a receiver. When these components are reduced to the nanoscale, the environmental noise becomes important and is a major cause for concern. The objective of the proposal is to address fluctuations, dynamics and dissipation in thermotronic components, based on nanoscale photon transport and working under environmental noise perturbations. This is achieved by considering the parameters that define the states of these components as stochastic variables, from which stability conditions for equilibrium states can be derived and the dynamics under general nonequilibrium scenarios can be characterized. The proposed scheme provides novel methods to estimate the mean life of the states of a thermal memory and to quantify the time response of thermotronic components, including the impact of environmental conditions which are of prime importance for applications. A nonequilibrium thermodynamics framework dealing with the associated stochastic dynamics is also proposed to account for dissipation as a key element to optimize the performance of these devices. The proposal paves the way for innovative strategies for an active control of radiative heat fluxes, strengthening tools and concepts for smart radiative thermal management. The proposed methods for the description of fluctuations, dynamics and dissipation can be applied to any other many-body system with radiative interactions.