The majority of nanostructures, which are used in nanotechnology, are composed of multilayered structures. These layered structures are of the thickness of a few nanometers to a few microns. The temperature between these thin layers can be greatly different. As a result of the thinness of the layers and the extreme temperature difference, they manifest thermal management challenges. In addition, these multilayered structures can be separated by the vacuum gap of a few nanometers or micrometers, which makes the physics of the heat transfer problem interesting. It is of our highest interest to investigate the thermal behavior of such structures through the physical models and computational algorithms.
My Ph.D. research is about nano-scale heat transfer. We focus on finding how different modes of heat transfer including radiation and phonon conduction contribute to energy transfer between two half-spaces separated by a nano-scale gap and other coating layers on top. The main application of this research topic is related to heat-assisted magnetic recording technology in the hard disk drives.
For further information please refer to the below publication list.

Publications
-
Ma, Y., Ghafari, A., Wu, Y., & Bogy, D. (2020). A Study of the Nanoscale Heat Transfer in the HDD Head–Disk Interface Based on a Static Touchdown Experiment. IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 56(3), 1-7.
-
Ma, Y., Ghafari, A., Budaev, B. V., & Bogy, D. B. (2017). Measurement and simulation of nanoscale gap heat transfer using a read/write head with a contact sensor. IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 53(2), 1-5.
-
Ma, Y., Ghafari, A., Budaev, B. V., & Bogy, D. B. (2016). Controlled heat flux measurement across a closing nanoscale gap and its comparison to theory. Applied Physics Letters, 108(21), 213105.
-
Budaev, B. V., Ghafari, A., & Bogy, D. B. (2016). Intense radiative heat transport across a nano-scale gap. Journal of Applied Physics, 119(14), 144501.
-
Sakhalkar, S., Cheng, Q., Ghafari, A., Ma, Y., & Bogy, D. (2019). Numerical and experimental investigation of heat transfer across a nanoscale gap between a magnetic recording head and various media. Applied Physics Letters, 115(22), 223102.
-
Sakhalkar, S. V., Cheng, Q., Ma, Y., Ghafari, A., & Bogy, D. B. (2019, November). Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Nanoscale Heat Transfer in the Head-Media Interface During Static Touchdown. In ASME 2019 28th Conference on Information Storage and Processing Systems. American Society of Mechanical Engineers Digital Collection.