Events Calendar

EE-Electrophysics

Speaker: Jesse Maassen, Purdue University

Talk Title: Heat transport on the nanoscale: lessons from electron transport

Abstract: Electronics has shaped our modern world. The downscaling of device dimensions that made this possible not only presented enormous technological challenges, it also raised many fundamental questions. Over the past two decades a deep understanding of electronic transport at the nanoscale has been developed, along with the computational tools that accurately capture the relevant physics. However, electron transport cannot be separated from phonon transport. Self-heating in nanoscale devices critically limits their performance, and coupled electron-phonon transport in nanostructures provides a route to increase the performance of thermoelectric energy conversion. Further progress in electronics will require a deeper understanding of thermal transport at the nanoscale along with the development of new computational tools that address challenges from the nano- to macro-scale. I have begun to tackle these issues in a unique way - by unifying the concepts and techniques for electron and phonon transport.

In this talk I will discuss our recent findings on nanoscale heat transport
- highlighting the similarities of electron and phonon transport. Work on the fundamental limits of thermal interface resistance and transport in 2D materials will be presented. In addition, I will describe a new approach to treat heat transport on all length and time scales. This technique is not only simple, computationally efficient and able to reproduce results of detailed modeling with high accuracy, but is also physically transparent thus providing new fundamental (and still controversial!) insights such as the fact that Fourier's Law often works very well at the nanoscale. Results of this method combined with detailed first principles modeling of nanomaterials will be presented.

We envision using this framework to analyze recent unresolved experiments, to help understand the results of detailed simulations, and to explore coupled electro-thermal transport in a variety nanoscale materials and devices.



Biography: Jesse Maassen received B.Eng. and M.A.Sc. degrees in engineering physics from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in 2006. He obtained a Ph.D. in physics from McGill University in 2011 by working on first principles simulations of nanoelectronic devices. Since 2012 Dr. Maassen has been a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue University working with Prof.
Mark Lundstrom. His research interests focus on exploring novel materials and devices, using predictive first principles modeling, with an emphasis on electro-thermal transport.

Jesse Maassen was awarded a Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council
(NSERC) of Canada, as well as a Postdoctoral Fellowship from NSERC. He won best doctoral thesis from McGill Physics Department in 2011, and received the Keren Prize for best theoretical work at the Trends in Nanotechnology conference.



Host: EE-Electrophysics

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Marilyn Poplawski