Prof. Philippe Ben-Abdallah, Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Université Paris-Saclay, Palaiseau Cedex, France

Title: Thermotronics: toward circuits for the thermal light.

Abstract: The control of electric currents in solids is at the origin of the modern electronics which have revolutionized our daily life. The diode and the transistor introduced by Braun, Bardeen and Brattain are undoubtedly the corner stones of modern information technologies. Such devices allow rectifying, switching, modulating and even amplifying the electric current. Astonishing, similar devices which would make possible the control of heat flow is not frequent at all in our current life. In this seminar I will discuss the possibility to develop, thermal analogs of these fundamental building block for controlling the flow of heat by radiation, instead of the flow of electrons. After describing the operating mode of a radiative diode and transistor we have recently introduced I will describe a mechanism of thermal bistability which is at the origin of the radiative thermal memory. Finally, the possibility to develop, contactless thermal logic gates to process heat flows with thermal photons using complex architectures will be discussed. While still in their infancy, these active devices could allow the realization of complex thermal circuits which could lead to a plethora of sophisticated applications such as active temperature control in microelectronics, smart IR image sensors, or even thermal computation with ultra-low power consumption.