From engines to nanochips: Physicists redefine how heat moves

> [At nanoscale] heat doesn't just "diffuse." It can ripple like sound waves, remember its past, or flow in elegant streams like a fluid in a pipe. For decades, scientists had pieces of this puzzle but no unifying explanation.

> Now, researchers at Auburn University and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have delivered what they call a "unified statistical theory of heat conduction."

> "Fourier's law was written 200 years ago; this breakthrough rewrites the rules for how heat conducts in the nanoscale and ultrafast world of today," said Prof. Jianjun (JJ) Dong, Thomas and Jean Walter Professor of Physics at Auburn University.

ScholarlyArticle: "Time-domain theory of transient heat conduction in the local limit" (2025) https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/p8wg-p1j3