Exploring Nanoscale Thermal Physics

Heat, a measure of entropy, is largely perceived to be diffusive and transported incoherently by charge carriers (electrons and holes) and lattice vibrations (phonons) in a material. Because heat can be carried by many different (quasi-)particles, it is generally hard to spatially localize the transport of the thermal energy. Heat transport is thus considered to be a challenging means of the local probing of a material and of its electronic states. Recently, we have shown that coherent electron and heat transport through a point-like contact in the atomic force microscope set-up at the ultra-high vacuum condition produces an atomic Seebeck effect, which represents the novel imaging principle of surface wave functions with atomic resolution. The heat-based scanning Seebeck microscopy clearly contrasts to the vacuum tunneling-based scanning tunneling microscopy, a hitherto golden standard of imaging surface wave functions. We have found that the coherent transmission probabilities of electron and phonon across the tip-sample junction are equally important for the imaging capability of the scanning Seebeck microscope. Very recently, we have also reported that abnormally enhanced nanoscale friction on ice-trapped graphene surface could be understood in terms of flexural phonon couplings between graphene and substrate (e.g. mica). Also, we have found that energetic tunneling electrons in scanning tunneling microscopy can cause chemical reactions at the single molecule level by locally exciting phonon modes of molecules (or nanoscale heating) under the tip through the inelastic electron-phonon scattering. In this talk, I will discuss how we theoretically explore nanoscale thermal physics including thermoelectric imaging, nanoscale friction, and single molecule chemical reaction, specifically in the setup of scanning probe microscopy.