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
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 significant. This is more important than that though, if substantiated it is a truly weird physics advance and there's no telling what applications it will find. The first AI or human decision support system that will offer dangerous self improvement capabilties is most likely going to be on some $10M-$100M system and the question is how do you see that coming? I mentioned moore's law as the first of many obvious and important areas this advance will impact if there is not some serious engineering bottleneck in putting it into practice, be that in moving up orders of magnitude in clock speed or providing wiring for brain implants that is small enough not to damage neural tissue and so forth. I'm seriously surprised to see a response to this advance that is not at least curious interest at an obviously related physics advance.
It's interesting and I hadn't thought of it, but it's not weird. The losses are from coupling between the substrate and the carrier electrons, so it makes sense that the energy will go there.