Study links heat transfer with bonding

TROY, N.Y., April 14 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've discovered a strong correlation between the speed at which heat moves between two materials and how strongly the materials bond.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers said they also determined the flow of heat from one material to another can be dramatically altered by "painting" a thin atomic layer between the materials, thereby altering the way the materials interact.

"If you have a nanoparticle that is inside a liquid solution, you can't just 'peel away' the liquid to measure how strongly it is bonded to the surrounding molecules," said Professor Pawel Keblinski, who co-led the study. "Instead, we show that you can measure the strength of these bonds simply by measuring the rate of heat flow from the nanoparticle to the surrounding liquid."

The study's co-leader, Professor Shekhar Garde, added: "Interfaces are an exciting new frontier for doing fundamental studies of this type. If you peek into complex biological systems -- a cell, for example -- they contain a high density of interfaces, between different proteins or between protein and water. Our approach possibly provides another handle to quantify how proteins talk to each other or with the surrounding water."

The study that included graduate students Natalia Shenogina and Rahul Godawat appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.