Atomic scale thermal sciences: from molecular phononics to near-field probing of nonequilibrium heat flow

Single atoms and molecules are the emerging frontier in engineering applications as they represent the ultimate limit of modern electronic and photonic devices. While controlling at these extremely small scales have become a reality, the understanding of energy transport, conversion, and dissipation properties of these systems is falling behind due to the lack of experimental tools. I will describe the effort of my lab in developing ultrasensitive and ultrastable scanning probe microscopes enabling the measurement of picowatt level small thermal signal at atomic and single-molecule scale, leading to the discovery of a series of wave effect-dominated thermal phenomenon that have been impossible in the past.