Basile Pottier, Carlos Plata, Emmanuel Trizac, David Guéry-Odelin and Ludovic Bellon, Phys. Rev. Applied 19, 034072 (2023)
[Article] doi: 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.19.034072
[Data set] doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7669037
In most systems, thermal diffusion is intrinsically slow with respect to mechanical relaxation. We devise here a generic approach to accelerate the relaxation of the temperature field of a 1D object, in order to beat the mechanical time scales. This approach is applied to a micro-meter sized silicon cantilever, locally heated by a laser beam. A tailored driving protocol for the laser power is derived to reach arbitrarily fast the thermal stationary state. The model is implemented experimentally yielding a significant acceleration of the thermal relaxation, up to a factor 30. An excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions is reported. This strategy allows to reach a thermal steady state significantly faster than the natural mechanical relaxation.