scanning thermal microscopy probes tagged posts

The view inside the Ultra High Vacuum Scanning Thermal Microscope, which was used to measure temperature fluxes at the nanoscale. Credit: Joseph Xu

When heat travels between 2 objects that aren’t touching, it flows differently at the smallest scales – distances on the order of the diameter of DNA, or 1/50,000 of a human hair. While researchers have been aware of this for decades, they haven’t understood the process. Heat flow often needs to be prevented or harnessed and the lack of an accurate way to predict it represents a bottleneck in nanotechnology development.

Now, in a unique ultra-low vibration lab at the University of Michigan, engineers have measured how heat radiates from one surface to another in a vacuum at distances down to 2nm...