Oldenburg. The physicist Dr. Svend-Age Biehs from Oldenburg and his collegues Dr. Viacheslav Kubytskyi and Dr. Philippe Ben-Abdallah from the university of Paris-Sud predict the existence of a thermal bistability in many-body systems out of thermal equilibrium which exchange heat by thermal radiation using insulator-metal transition materials. They propose a writing-reading procedure and demonstrate the possibility to exploit the thermal bistability to make a volatile thermal memory. This thermal memory can be used to store heat and thermal information (via an encoding temperature) for arbitrary long times. The radiative thermal bistability could find broad applications in the domains of thermal management, information processing, and energy storage.

Details can be found in the August issue of „Physical Review Letters“:

Viacheslav Kubytskyi, Svend-Age Biehs, Philippe Ben-Abdallah, „Radiative bistability and thermal memory“, Physical Review Letters 113, 074301