Computation with phonons

Baowen LI

Department of Physics and Centre for Computational Science and Engineering

National University of Singapore

Information processing in the world's computers is mostly carried out in compact electronic devices, which use the flow of electrons both to carry and control information. There are, however, other potential information carriers, such as photons, which are parcels of light. Indeed a major industry, photonics, has developed around the sending of messages encoded in pulsed light.

In this talk, I will demonstrate that, the heat pulses, or phonons, rippling through a crystal, might also be used to carry information and processed accordingly. In particular, I will show that similar devices to the electric counterparts such as thermal diode, thermal transistor, as well as thermal logic gate can be built up from nonlinear lattices.

Refs:

1. B. Li et al, Thermal Diode: rectification of heat flux. PRL 93, 184301 (2004)

2. B. Li et al, Negative differential thermal resistance and thermal transistor, APL 88, 143501 (2006).

3. L Wand and B Li, Thermal logic gate: Computation with phonons, PRL 99, xx (2007).