题目：Phononic Computer (声子电脑): Computation with heat
Abstract
Information processing in the world's computers is mostly carried out in compact electronic devices, which use the flow of electrons both to carry and control information. There are, however, other potential information carriers, such as photons, which are parcels of light. Indeed a major industry, photonics, has developed around the sending of messages encoded in pulsed light. In this talk I will demonstrate via different theoretical models of thermal devices such as thermal diode and thermal transistor that, heat pulses, or phonons, rippling through a crystal might also become a major carrier. By combining thermal transistor in different ways, one can also build up thermal logic gate, thus open the possibility that, heat energy already present in abundance in electronic devices, can be used to process information and even to do computation.Some experiments with nanostructures will also be discussed.
报告人：Professor Baowen Li Department of Physics ，Centre for Computational Science and Engineering，National University of Singapore
时间：4:30pm, 2008-4-28（星期一）
地点： 中心１楼3113室（物理多媒体教室）
Baowen Li 教授简介
Professor Li received his B.Sci (1985) from Nanjing University, M.Sci (1989) from Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing. In 1990 he received the Max-Planck Scholarship and went to Germany for his Ph. D study. He finished his Ph. D thesis within two years, and got the Dr.rer.nat degree in 1992 from Universitat of Oldenburg. After random walks in Europe, US, and Hong Kong, He joined NUS in July 2000 as an assistant professor, and promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2003 and full professor in 2007. He is currently Director of Centre for Computational Science and Engineering and EXCO member of NGS. He has published more than 90 papers in refereed journals including 16 in PRL. H-Index is 20. He has been awarded NUS Young Researcher Award in 2003, Temasek Young Investigator Award in 2004, National Science Award 2005, Singapore, and 2005 Oversea’s Chinese Physics Association (OCPA) Asia Achievement Award. His recent works on thermal diode, thermal transistor, and thermal logic gate have laid a theoretical foundation for phononic computer – computation with heat, which has caught world-wide media attention including Physics News Update (AIP),Physics Review Focus, PhysOrg, Zaobao, and all main Chinese media worldwide such as CCTV, People’s Daily, Chinese Science Times, Science and Technology News …His research interests include but not limited to heat conduction in low dimensional systems, energy transport in nano scale materials, thermoelectrical effect in nanostructures, effect of quantum chaos on quantum computation, complex networks and systems biology, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, inverse scattering problem, waves propagation and scattering in random/turbulent media etc.