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A Thermodynamic Approach to Measuring Entropy in a Few-Electron Nanodevice
Version 1
: Received: 21 April 2021 / Approved: 22 April 2021 / Online: 22 April 2021 (13:29:10 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Pyurbeeva, E.; Mol, J.A. A Thermodynamic Approach to Measuring Entropy in a Few-Electron Nanodevice. Entropy 2021, 23, 640. Pyurbeeva, E.; Mol, J.A. A Thermodynamic Approach to Measuring Entropy in a Few-Electron Nanodevice. Entropy 2021, 23, 640.
Abstract
The entropy of a system gives a powerful insight into its microscopic degrees of freedom, however standard experimental ways of measuring entropy through heat capacity are hard to apply to nanoscale systems, as they require the measurement of increasingly small amounts of heat. Two alternative entropy measurement methods have been recently proposed for nanodevices: through charge balance measurements and transport properties. We describe a self-consistent thermodynamic framework for treating few-electron nanodevices which incorporates both existing entropy measurement methods, whilst highlighting several ongoing misconceptions. We show that both methods can be described as special cases of a more general relation and prove its applicability in systems with complex microscopic dynamics – those with many excited states of various degeneracies.
Keywords
nanoscale system; quantum transport; Coulomb blockade; entropy measurement; thermodynamic relations
Subject
Physical Sciences, Acoustics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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