Prof. Michael Roukes (CalTech): Yoctocalorimetry: Is it possible to measure directly the (miniscule) heat evolved by a logic operation?

6 May 2016

About two decades ago I envisioned experiments to count individual thermal phonons in suspended nanostructures; then they seemed “just” feasible. To date, however, this goal has remained unattained – and while the experiments remain extremely challenging, recent technological progress on several fronts now makes them worthy of reconsideration. Single-phonon sensitivity will open up an exotic regime, in which energy transport phenomena with analogs in classical and quantum optics will be manifested. Among the possibilities I originally envisioned were phonon shot noise, phonon bunching, anticorrelated electron-phonon scattering, and the phonon-by-phonon energy decay of a quasi-isolated thermal reservoir. Today there is additional scientific motivation for such investigations: in the past several years, Landauer’s estimate for the energy dissipation upon bit erasure, kBT ln 2, has been deduced from several dynamical measurements of model systems – but direct measurements of the associated heat flow have never been reported. In this informal talk I will review my early ideas and describe what we’re embarking to do now in this realm, within the context of the collaborative InfoEngines MURI project.

* This work is being carried out in collaboration with: Matthew Matheny, Warren Fon, and Raj Katti (Caltech), Olli-Pentti Saira and Jukka Pekola (Aalto U.), and James Crutchfield (UC Davis)