Outreach

Javier Argüello, SURF@IFISC 2014 program fellow, wins the 14th Archimedes Contest

“Asymmetries of heat in nanoconductors: the role of incoherence and inelasticity» has been awarded with the first prize in Experimental, Exact and Environmental Sciences of the 14th Archimedes National Contest. This investigation has been performed by Javier Argüello, fellow of the 2014 SURF@IFISC program, and supervised by Rosa López and David Sanchez, both of them IFISC staff researchers.

Argüello has investigated the heat flow between two terminals coupled to a nanostructure in the presence of inelastic scattering. It is found that the heat can be asymmetrically dissipated between the contacts and that this asymmetry disappears when the amount of inelasticity increases.

The Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems started in 2013 the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF@IFISC), a scholarship program to initiate young students in research tasks. During the last three summers, 21 students worldwide have enjoyed this opportunity.

The main objective of the Archimedes Contest is to foster research among college students by granting awards for original research projects. In the 2014 edition, 218 works from Spanish universities (116 from master students and 102 from undergraduates) were presented. Javier Argüello, student of the double degree of Physics and Mathematics at the Complutense University of Madrid, was one of the 27 selected for the final meeting, held in Madrid on November 25 of 2015, after which he won the first prize.

http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/12/03/pdfs/BOE-A-2015-13120.pdf