Our paper entitled “Heat transport through a solid-solid junction: the interface as an autonomous thermodynamic system” has been accepted for publication in the journal, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics. The work was performed in collaboration with Dr. Riccardo Rurali from the Materials Science Institute of Barcelona, Prof. Dr. Luciano Colombo from the Department of Physics at the University of Cagliari, Prof. Dr. Xavier Cartoixà from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Autonomous University of Barcelona,
and my national colleagues, Dr. Thuat T. Trinh, Prof. Dr. Dick Bedeaux and Prof. Dr. Signe Kjelstrup from NTNU. In the work, we demonstrate with nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations that the interface of a nanowire solid-solid junction can be considered to be an autonomous system at local equilibrium. In the paper, we show this for the first time for an interface between two solids. The practical consequence of this is that the Kapitza resistance (rK) of a solid-solid junction can be regarded as an interfacial property. For the nanowire junction, this means that we can tabulate the Kapitza resistance as a function of only the surface temperature, (TS) and the Kapitza resistance is thus independent of the applied thermal bias. The figure below shows the Kapitza resistance of a nanowire junction as a function of the surface temperature for many applied thermal biases.