All-thermal transistor based on stochastic switching

Abstract

Defining thermal analogs of electrical components is required for the demanding task of managing heat in devices. The authors introduce a novel strategy to achieve a thermal transistor by utilizing thermal fluctuations. They identify the absorption of heat through inelastic transitions as the main limitation of existing proposals and solve this problem by partitioning the device so that the conductor is coupled to the heat source via an auxiliary system whose fluctuations act as a switch for heat flow. This can be achieved even with arbitrarily low heat injection, which results in extremely large amplification coefficients. This concept may open up a new avenue for the efficient manipulation of heat by heat and, more generally, for the field of noise-assisted thermal devices.