Energy balance and heat exchange in mesoscopic systems.

The spatial distribution of the power transferred from the electrons to the phonon bath is calculated for several mesoscopic structures with use of the nonequilibrium Green's-function formalism. We introduce the concept of a «current potential» μ J , which has the property that the local power transfer is proportional to its spatial derivative. At low bias, the local power transfer between the electrons and the phonon bath can be separated into a component that is linear in the applied bias and a component that goes quadratically with bias