Congratulations to Zhiliang Pan, recipient of the 2024 VINSE Best Graduate Student Publication award. Zhiliang’s publication in Nature reports on the first demonstration of direct experimental evidence for substantial heat conduction along SiC nanowires mediated by surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs), hybrid quasi-particles resulting from coupling between infrared photons and optically active phonons. This discovery upends the traditional wisdom that electrons and phonons are the dominant energy carriers for heat conduction in solids. In addition to a cash prize, Zhiliang will give the graduate student presentation at the 24rd annual Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Forum on November 22, 2024. First published in 1869, Nature is the world’s leading multidisciplinary scientific journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery.
“Remarkable heat conduction mediated by non-equilibrium phonon polaritons,” authored by Zhiliang Pan, Guanyu Lu, Xun Li, James R. McBride, Rinkle Juneja, Mackey Long, Lucas Lindsay, Joshua D. Caldwell and Deyu Li, was published in Nature 623, 307-312 (2023).