In recent years, Professor LI Baowen and his team have been conducting research on the phonon transport in the micro-nano structure. They found that phonons can be used to carry and transmit information just like electrons, thus putting forward a series of component models such as the thermal diode, thermal triode, thermal logic gate, and thermal memory. As a result of their efforts, the whole new research field of phononics is gradually arousing people's attention. However, the thermal diode, as the basic component, was tested in earlier experiments as having the thermal rectification efficiency of only 7% setting a considerable limit to its practical use.

CHEN Jie, the researcher of the School of Physics Science and Engineering of Tongji University, worked with the relevant research groups of Kyushu University and Tsinghua University, raising thermal rectification up to 26% for the first time using graphene, a two-dimensional material. This reveals important progress in this field. In addition, they also found that asymmetric phonon localization is another mechanism that leads to thermal rectification.

The research results are presented in Experimental Study of Thermal Rectification in Suspended Monolayer Graphene, which was published recently in Nature Communications with doctoral student HU Shiqian as the first co-author, and researcher CHEN Jie as the co-corresponding author.