Thank you or the well considered response, actually helpful. You have my background about right, I published in a physicists in medicine conference and have the normal background in comparch and whatever classes I took for my math double. Definitely not a condensed matter physicist, will have to read more on phonons.
The idea that this is a hollow tube and so there is no interior region to be effected does seem intuitive. The thing that jumped out at me is that the tube itself remained cool.
I don’t have a good understanding of quantum electrodynamics or phonons and that is one reason I wanted to bring this up for discussion. Some types of scattering like bremsstrahlung seem like they play a role, but it doesn’t seem to explain it, from the lead scientist:
“”We believe that the nanotube’s electrons are creating electrical fields due to the current, and the substrate’s atoms are directly responding to those fields,” Cumings explains. “The transfer of energy is taking place through these intermediaries, and not because the nanotube’s electrons are bouncing off of the substrate’s atoms. While there is some analogy to a microwave oven, the physics behind the two phenomena is actually very different.”″
http://newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=2657
The normal mechanism for heating in electric current transmission as I understand it, the electrons are bouncing off other atoms causing them to vibrate. So we make a transistor or a wire and we a pass a current through it, the atoms inside get hotter and we then dissipate that heat. They don’t appear to think this is what is going on here.
It seems like the electrons go through the nanotube wire and the energy kind of jumps from the current to the tube to the substrate it’s laying on without accumulating much inside the wire itself.
They claim this is a weird game changer which every scientist wants to find, so either that’s hype or it’s legit. It seems like you have a good understanding, this is in a discussion area, what’s your opinion, is this a big discovery that is going to lead to multilayer chips orders of magnitude faster or is it just a fluke thing?
Phonons are the quanta of lattice vibration. Vibrations are one kind of imperfection in a lattice.
Electrical carriers (electrons and holes) do not scatter off of individual lattice atoms; they scatter off of lattice imperfections. These imperfections can be defects, or phonons, or other carriers.
On to the claims in the article… as before. Usefulness? I’m not really sure. If you’re always using these nanotubes to carry currents, their entire environment will heat up (the heat will leak into them eventually), so it seems like it would only really help in cases where it needs to carry a current spike.
If yi would have to do more reading to understand the lattice stuff, it seems reasonable though.
As far as usefulness, the idea I had was you could layer a substrate to dissipate the heat really well. My limited understanding is 85% of the heat jumps the wires somehow and is absorbed by the substrate, which could be engineered arbitrarily. This is important because cnt are very good electrical conductors so you could pair them with a good head absorbing substance and achieve separation of heat and current in ways we have not seen before, which one could speculate as a way to restart moores law progression of speed.
Thank you or the well considered response, actually helpful. You have my background about right, I published in a physicists in medicine conference and have the normal background in comparch and whatever classes I took for my math double. Definitely not a condensed matter physicist, will have to read more on phonons.
The idea that this is a hollow tube and so there is no interior region to be effected does seem intuitive. The thing that jumped out at me is that the tube itself remained cool.
I don’t have a good understanding of quantum electrodynamics or phonons and that is one reason I wanted to bring this up for discussion. Some types of scattering like bremsstrahlung seem like they play a role, but it doesn’t seem to explain it, from the lead scientist:
“”We believe that the nanotube’s electrons are creating electrical fields due to the current, and the substrate’s atoms are directly responding to those fields,” Cumings explains. “The transfer of energy is taking place through these intermediaries, and not because the nanotube’s electrons are bouncing off of the substrate’s atoms. While there is some analogy to a microwave oven, the physics behind the two phenomena is actually very different.”″ http://newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=2657
The normal mechanism for heating in electric current transmission as I understand it, the electrons are bouncing off other atoms causing them to vibrate. So we make a transistor or a wire and we a pass a current through it, the atoms inside get hotter and we then dissipate that heat. They don’t appear to think this is what is going on here.
It seems like the electrons go through the nanotube wire and the energy kind of jumps from the current to the tube to the substrate it’s laying on without accumulating much inside the wire itself.
They claim this is a weird game changer which every scientist wants to find, so either that’s hype or it’s legit. It seems like you have a good understanding, this is in a discussion area, what’s your opinion, is this a big discovery that is going to lead to multilayer chips orders of magnitude faster or is it just a fluke thing?
Phonons are the quanta of lattice vibration. Vibrations are one kind of imperfection in a lattice.
Electrical carriers (electrons and holes) do not scatter off of individual lattice atoms; they scatter off of lattice imperfections. These imperfections can be defects, or phonons, or other carriers.
On to the claims in the article… as before. Usefulness? I’m not really sure. If you’re always using these nanotubes to carry currents, their entire environment will heat up (the heat will leak into them eventually), so it seems like it would only really help in cases where it needs to carry a current spike.
If yi would have to do more reading to understand the lattice stuff, it seems reasonable though.
As far as usefulness, the idea I had was you could layer a substrate to dissipate the heat really well. My limited understanding is 85% of the heat jumps the wires somehow and is absorbed by the substrate, which could be engineered arbitrarily. This is important because cnt are very good electrical conductors so you could pair them with a good head absorbing substance and achieve separation of heat and current in ways we have not seen before, which one could speculate as a way to restart moores law progression of speed.