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Comment on "Fundamental limit of phonon Tesla valve for heat rectification from first principles"

Statistical Mechanics 2026-06-24 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

Thermal rectification is a two-terminal property: the same device must carry different heat-current magnitudes when two reservoir temperatures are interchanged. In this Comment on Ref.~\cite{WuHu2026}, we ask whether the reported ratio γ=Rf/Rb\gamma=R_{\mathrm{f}}/R_{\mathrm{b}} can represent such a two-terminal rectification ratio within the fixed-background linearized phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) used in that work. We show that, for a passive two-terminal reservoir problem, any fixed linearized BTE whose scattering operator preserves a uniform equilibrium temperature shift, and whose boundary-value problem is well posed, gives equal forward and reverse resistance magnitudes. A direction-dependent response can still occur under a prescribed gradient-weighted source--sink protocol, but such a response should be distinguished from two-terminal thermal rectification.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.28407,
  title  = {Comment on "Fundamental limit of phonon Tesla valve for heat rectification from first principles"},
  author = {Samuel Huberman and Aleksei Sokolov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.28407},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Comment on https://doi.org/10.1103/bgr6-wryy