Yan Wang
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering·Early-career
Heat is a major limit in modern devices. Microchips and lasers that overheat, or that conduct heat in ways designers cannot control, stop working as intended.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
phonons
lattice thermal conductivity
thermal transport
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Determine how wave-like phonons, atomic vibrations that carry heat, travel, scatter and become trapped in periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic structures, combining spectral phonon analysis with phonon spectroscopy.
- Clarify the transition between particle-like and wave-like phonon behavior in layered and nanostructured crystals, using complementary computational and experimental techniques.
- Minimize lattice heat conduction by suppressing wave-like and particle-like phonon transport separately, using machine learning-aided phonon analysis and structure optimization.
More about the research
In semiconductor crystals, heat is carried mostly by phonons, which are collective vibrations of the atoms. Phonons are usually treated as particles that travel through a material and bounce off defects or off each other. In structures built from repeating layers or features, however, phonons can also act as waves. Waves can add up and pass through easily, or cancel out and stop. Examples include quantum cascade lasers, made of alternating material layers, and integrated circuits packed with nano-transistors.
Why it matters
Better control of heat at the nanoscale could help engineers remove heat from quantum cascade lasers and densely packed integrated circuits. The same knowledge could help them block heat flow in thermoelectric materials, which turn heat into electricity, and in thermal barriers. This could ease a key bottleneck for technologies whose performance is limited by heat.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
Asegun Henry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Engineering
Advance understanding of phonon transport, the atomic vibrations that carry heat, in disordered materials whose atoms lack a regular repeating arrangement, using advanced computational approaches.
Jivtesh Garg
University of Oklahoma, OK·Engineering
Test whether evanescent electric fields across 2–4 Å interfacial gaps help acoustic phonons, the lattice vibrations that carry heat, cross GaN–diamond interfaces, using atomistic Green's function calculations.
The school
University of Nevada-Reno: 11 labs on PI Pages, $194M a year on research, 186 research doctorates a year.
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