Researcher Highlight: Zhiliang Pan
Zhiliang Pan, a postdoc in Dr. Deyu Li’s Lab in the Mechanical Engineering department after earning his Ph.D. from the same lab in May 2023.
Cooling technologies are important in a wide spectrum of engineering applications from thermal management of micro/optoelectronic devices to maintenance of comfort building environment. It is becoming more crucial as we battle the climate crisis through more efficient energy usage and effective cooling of the environment. Novel and powerful cooling strategies could emerge from manipulating thermal transport at the nanoscale, which requires fundamental understanding of how energy carriers transport heat.
Zhiliang’s research focuses on experimental studies of thermal transport in low-dimensional polar nanostructures, and he has contributed to several very interesting projects. One is the first experimental demonstration of superdiffusive phonon transport in quasi-one-dimensional van der Waals crystal NbSe3 nanowires, whose thermal conductivity becomes divergent as the wire length extends. More recently, he leads the effort of probing the effect of surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs), hybrid quasi-particles resulting from coupling between infrared photons and optical phonons, on heat conduction in SiC nanowires. His team shows that efficient stimulation of non-equilibrium SPhPs could make remarkable contribution to the thermal conductivity of SiC nanowires, opening the door for engineering thermal properties of polar nanostructures via exciting SPhPs.
His research involves heavy usage of the VINSE imaging facilities to characterize and process nanomaterials. The cooperation and support provided by the VINSE staff have consistently been highly valuable, and he anticipates the opportunity to collaborate with them further in the coming times.
Contact: Zhiliang Pan