Experimental Development of a Radiative Thermal Memristor
Abstract
We report the experimental realization of a radiative thermal memristor made of a 200-nm-thick VO2 film exchanging heat by far-field radiation with a heat-flux sensor. This two-terminal device exploits the metal–insulator transition and thermal hysteresis of VO2, exhibiting large emissivity variations and a hysteresis width of 5 K around the mean temperature T0 = 338.7 K. Under low-frequency sinusoidal modulation of the VO2 temperature around T0, we observe a pinched, infinity-shaped Lissajous curve for the heat flux versus temperature difference. From this characteristic curve we extract a history-dependent thermal memristance with clear ON and OFF states defined by the emissivity contrast between its insulating and metallic phases. These memristive states remain robust over multiple cycles, enabling binary information encoding in a purely radiative configuration. Our results demonstrate the operation of a contactless thermal memristor and provide a fundamental element for thermal memories, thermal neurons, and neuromorphic networks analogous to their electrical counterparts.
Related
- Photonic thermal management of overhead cables via high-thermal-conductivity radiative cooling
- Inverse identification of thermal-radiative parameters for reduced effective-temperature uncertainty in an ion optical clock
- Radiative corrections to double-β decay and their impact on experimental analyses
- Memristor-coupled discrete chaotic maps for lock-in error suppression in ring laser gyroscopes
- Electro-thermal PEMFC system modeling with experimental validation on 6 kW liquid-cooled stack
BibTeX
@article{espinoza2026experimental,
title = {{Experimental Development of a Radiative Thermal Memristor}},
author = {Jose Abraham Chan Espinoza and Irving Alonzo-Zapata and Ruben Medina Esquivel and Fernando Cervantes-Alvarez and Adriana Paola Franco Bacca and Monica Monserrat Martinez-Garcia and Bharathi Rajeswaran and Frédéric Dumas-Bouchiat and Corinne Champeaux and Jose Ordonez-Miranda and Mohamed Chaker and Juan Jose Alvarado-Gil},
journal = {Nano Letters},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.1021/acs.nanolett.6c03860},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05769259v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Experimental Development of a Radiative Thermal Memristor
AU - Jose Abraham Chan Espinoza
AU - Irving Alonzo-Zapata
AU - Ruben Medina Esquivel
AU - Fernando Cervantes-Alvarez
AU - Adriana Paola Franco Bacca
AU - Monica Monserrat Martinez-Garcia
AU - Bharathi Rajeswaran
AU - Frédéric Dumas-Bouchiat
AU - Corinne Champeaux
AU - Jose Ordonez-Miranda
AU - Mohamed Chaker
AU - Juan Jose Alvarado-Gil
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
JO - Nano Letters
DO - 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6c03860
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05769259v1
AB - We report the experimental realization of a radiative thermal memristor made of a 200-nm-thick VO2 film exchanging heat by far-field radiation with a heat-flux sensor. This two-terminal device exploits the metal–insulator transition and thermal hysteresis of VO2, exhibiting large emissivity variations and a hysteresis width of 5 K around the mean temperature T0 = 338.7 K. Under low-frequency sinusoidal modulation of the VO2 temperature around T0, we observe a pinched, infinity-shaped Lissajous curve for the heat flux versus temperature difference. From this characteristic curve we extract a history-dependent thermal memristance with clear ON and OFF states defined by the emissivity contrast between its insulating and metallic phases. These memristive states remain robust over multiple cycles, enabling binary information encoding in a purely radiative configuration. Our results demonstrate the operation of a contactless thermal memristor and provide a fundamental element for thermal memories, thermal neurons, and neuromorphic networks analogous to their electrical counterparts.
SN - 1530-6984
SN - 1530-6992
ER -