April 10 - 14, 2023
San Francisco, California
2023 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium SF03-Emerging Thermal Materials—From Nanoscale Heat Transport, Devices and Applications, to Theories

This symposium will broadly cover current and emerging thermal materials, with aspects ranging from nanoscale and non-equilibrium heat transport, thermal Hall effect, devices, applications, to new theories. The first part of the symposium will focus on emerging materials with extremely high or extremely low thermal conductivity for thermal management, materials systems for thermoelectric, thermophotovoltaics, thermo-electrochemical, thermo-acoustic, -ferroelectric, and -magnetic energy harvesting, storage, as well as advanced control and functionalities. Discussions will include the rational design, chemical synthesis, growth mechanisms, fabrication routes, property optimization and external field control, and new fundamental science. The Second part of the symposium will focus on recent developments of nanoscale heat transport with both new experimental metrologies and theoretical methods from density functional theory (DFT) to machine learning. In particular, with continuing miniaturization of devices, as well as continuing development of experimental techniques, unprecedented length and time scales can now be probed, thus enabling new insights of non-Fourier heat conduction, convection, near-field radiation, and their interactions with materials, all now being intensively investigated. Discussions will include recent measurements over nanoscales and interfaces using advanced characterization techniques such as pump-probe thermoreflectance measurements, Raman thermometry, atomic force microscopy based thermometry, and recent modeling using atomistic tools such as ab initio DFT, molecular dynamics, and Wigner and Green's function formalisms, etc., as well as multi-scale modeling such as phonon Boltzmann Equation and Monte Carlo simulations. Possible topics of interest are thermal transport in extreme environments (high pressure/temperature), non-Fourier thermal transport and conductance via other than phonon and electrons heat carriers, thermal radiation from metamaterials, nano-thermodynamics. The Third part of the symposium will focus on devices and applications at across multiple time and length scales: examples include but are not limited to nanoscale thermal rectification devices, mesoscopic scale phononic crystals, and macroscopic thermal batteries, solar thermal plants, data farms, and the Internet of things.

Topics will include:

  • Materials for thermoelectrics and thermal energy harvesting
  • Thermal management of electronics, photonics, batteries, and the Internet of things
  • Emerging thermal materials for extreme properties and conditions
  • Thermal transport in 2D, 1D, and 0D nanomaterials
  • Emerging thermal interface materials and interface phonon and electron states
  • Quantum phenomena and coupling between phonons, electrons, and spins
  • Phonon thermal Hall effect and underlying interactions
  • Non-equilibrium and femto- to pico-second thermal transient behaviors
  • Radiative cooling and thermal metamaterials
  • Ab initio and atomistic theory for designing, predicting, and analyzing thermal properties
  • Interplay of propagating and diffusing heat transport from particle and wave descriptions
  • Modelling and simulations of energy transport from atomic scale to micrometer and macroscopic scales
  • Coherent and ballistic thermal transport
  • Thermal management for sustainable buildings and environments
  • Thermal insulation and multifunctional materials (mesosporous materials, ambient gels, aerogels)
  • Materials defects on nanoscale energy transport
  • Materials discovery through machine learning and artificial intelligence

Invited Speakers:

  • David Broido (Boston College, USA)
  • Renkun Chen (University of California, San Diego, USA)
  • Xiao-Jia Chen (Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research, China)
  • Sukwon Choi (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
  • David Clarke (Harvard University, USA)
  • Chris Dames (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Davide Donadio (University of California, Davis, USA)
  • Elif Ertekin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
  • Giulia Galli (The University of Chicago, USA)
  • Samuel Graham (University of Maryland, USA)
  • Costas Grigoropoulos (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Jeff Grossman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Cynthia Hipwell (Texas A&M University, USA)
  • Matthias Ihme (Stanford University, USA)
  • Raymond Jeanloz (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Philip Kim (Harvard University, USA)
  • Irena Knezevic (University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA)
  • Martin Kuball (University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
  • Jung-Fu Lin (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Jonathan Malen (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Nicola Marzari (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  • Peter Maurer (The University of Chicago, USA)
  • Natalio Mingo (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, France)
  • Vidvuds Ozolins (Yale University, USA)
  • Xiaoqing Pan (University of California, Irvine, USA)
  • Dimos Poulikakos (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
  • Junichiro Shiomi (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
  • Jeff Snyder (Northwestern University, USA)
  • Chris Van de Walle (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
  • Sebastian Volz (CentraleSupélec, France)
  • Robert Wang (Arizona State University, USA)
  • Xiaojia Wang (University of Minnesota, USA)
  • Nuo Yang (Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China)

Symposium Organizers

Yongjie Hu
University of California, Los Angeles
USA

Lucas Lindsay
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
USA

Amy Marconnet
Purdue University
USA

Ivana Savic
Tyndall National Institute
Ireland

Topics

aerogel defects energy generation energy storage environmentally protective flexible machine learning nanostructure thermoelectricity