Ubiquitous thermal rectification induced by non-diffusive weak scattering at low temperature in one-dimensional materials: Revealed with a non-reflective heat reservoir

¹ State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex System, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Peking University - Beijing 100871, China
² HEDPS, Center for Applied Physics and Technology, and College of Engineering, Peking University Beijing 100871, China

^(a) jxwang@pku.edu.cn
^(b) weikang@pku.edu.cn

Received: 20 July 2013
Accepted: 3 January 2014

Abstract

With a newly devised non-reflective heat reservoir and a one-dimensional lattice model with experimental conditions as references, we numerically demonstrate the intrinsic ubiquity of thermal rectification in microscopic one-dimensional materials. When reflections from heat reservoirs are excluded, only non-diffusive weak scatterings from the cubic and quartic interaction and a single interface in a lattice model are revealed to be necessary for thermal rectification to occur. Non-reflective reservoirs are critical to decouple intrinsic thermal rectification properties from correlated effects of heat reservoirs. Our results suggest that an elemental unit of thermal rectification devices, which demonstrates rectification by itself, is possible to be realized at room temperature.