  Violations of the second law of thermodynamics for small systems well below
the thermodynamic limit has already been experimentally observed. However, the
effects of such violations on experimentally measurable quantities have not
been studied in detail. Here we report the effect of transient violations,
i.e., spontaneous transfer of heat from cold to hot objects, on heat transfer
in silicon nanowire by modeling the violations as a Poisson process. Our
modeling and simulations show that it is increasingly difficult to cool down
the nanoscale objects to the bath temperature, there is a transition from power
law to exponential behavior, and the fluctuations have inverse square law
dependence on number of sites.

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics