Carbon nanotubes: The weird world of 'remote Joule heating'
Minimizing Joule heating remains an important goal in the design of electronic devices1, 2. The prevailing model of Joule heating relies on a simple semiclassical picture in which electrons collide with the atoms of a conductor, generating heat locally and only in regions of non-zero current density, and this model has been supported by most experiments. Recently, however, it has been predicted that electric currents in graphene and carbon nanotubes can couple to the vibrational modes of a neighbouring material3, 4, heating it remotely5. Here, we use in situ electron thermal microscopy to detect the remote Joule heating of a silicon nitride substrate by a single multiwalled carbon nanotube. At least 84%of the electrical power supplied to the nanotube is dissipated directly into the substrate, rather than in the nanotube itself. Although it has different physical origins, this phenomenon is reminiscent of induction heating or microwave dielectric heating. Such an ability to dissipate waste energy remotely could lead to improved thermal management in electronic devices6."
Carbon nanotubes in biology and medicine: In vitro and in vivo detection, imaging and drug delivery
I think that outside view estimates- "here's Moore's Law, this is the point at which the processing power of a human brain will cost the equivalent of $1,000 in 2012 dollars"- are way more robust than inside view estimates- "we just came up with subtechnology 734 out of ~5k necessary."
it seems much more important than tech 734/5000 necessary... carbon nanotubes are one of the core scientific discoveries of our generation and this shows a really interesting property of them directly related to electronics development. The heat dissapation bottleneck has been the most serious issue with nanotech and much, much faster and smaller processors. When we went from faster chips to multiple cores, things became really different - parallel algorithms are inherently more difficult and tech that could reinstate an exponentiation phase is extremely ... (read more)