The scope of this workshop is to gather physicists, chemists and engineers across different communities involved to various extents in the topic of thermal transport and radiation at the nanoscale, to favour the exchange of ideas and plant the seed for future collaborations, which would benefit from a broad and diversified background.
We plan to involve scientists working on the fundamentals of statistical physics and heat transport in low dimensional systems, theoretical material scientists involved in simulations, experimentalists measuring phonon transport in nanostructures, in nanocomposites and heat exchange between nanoparticles and soft matter, and engineers designing new materials and devices for thermal management and energy conversion.
The workshop will focus on the following main topics:
- statistical physics and foundations of heat transport in low dimensional systems
- design of efficient thermoelectric materials for energy harvesting, active cooling metrology
- fundamentals of radiation at the nanoscale: optical properties and near field
- transport and radiation in soft and biological systems
Such topics will be subject of lectures from the invited speakers and will be developed into four topical round-table discussions, and in a final debate on the future perspectives of the field of nanophononics and nanoscale heat transfer.
This choice of topics should provide a fair balance between fundamental science and applications. As for fundamental principles of heat transfer at the nanoscale, it will be useful to compare and match the models and interpretations of experimentalists and engineers, with those of statistical physicists and computational materials scientists, finding a correspondence between a mesoscopic understanding of phonon transport and atomistic simulations.
A major effort will be deployed in moving the field beyond traditional applications of phononic engineering, such as improving the performances of thermoelectric materials, towards exploring the perspectives of innovative applications, related for example to medical treatments and imaging or phonon-based information technology.