Heat generation due to the Anderson catastrophe in mesoscopic devices

Abstract: Anderson's orthogonality catastrophe (AOC) theorem establishes that the ground state of the many-body fermion system is asymptotically orthogonal to the ground state of the same system perturbed by a scattering potential, so that the overlap between the original and new ground states decays to zero with the system size. We adopt the AOC for a description of heat production in a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistor. We find that the heat released in the transistor comprises two distinct components, contribution from the dissipation accompanying electron transmission under the applied voltage and purely quantum-mechanical AOC part due to the change in scattering matrix for electrons upon switching between high and low conductance regimes. We calculate the AOC-induced heat production, which we call switching heat.