Imaging the Thermalization of Hot Carriers After Thermionic Emission Over a Polytype Barrier

Interfaces and the microscopic mechanisms of thermoelectric effects are important considerations in the thermal design of nanoelectronics, but progress is stymied by the difficulty of measuring thermal transport at the nanoscale. This study uses scanning thermal microscopy to obtain temperature maps of i00exn o00exp00exe00exr00exa00exn00exd00exo nanowire devices exhibiting heat pumping by thermionic emission. The lateral resolution is high enough to extract the electron thermalization length from the images and perform a complete thermoelectric characterization of the device. The thermalization length is of the order of the system's size, which can strongly guide our thinking about these effects in nanodevices.