Evaporative cooling of electrons in semiconductor devices

We discuss the theory of cooling of electrons in solid-state devices by evaporative emission. Our model is based on filtering electron subbands in a quantum-wire device. When the higher-subband electrons scatter out of the initial electron distribution, the system equilibrates at a different chemical potential and temperature than those of the input system. Our calculation shows that such filtering can give considerable cooling. We discuss the effect of device geometry on cooling.