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5
Thermal Nanosensors
5.1 Introduction
Temperature is a fundamental physical property in both scientic and
industrial elds. It is one of the primary physical quantities that is routinely
measured to derive other thermodynamic quantities such as heat, energy,
or specic heat capacity (the ratio of the amount of heat, measured in calo-
ries, required to raise the temperature of 1 g of a substance by 1°C to the
amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a similar mass of a ref-
erence material, usually water, by the same amount); thermodynamics is the
science that deals with the relationships and conversions between heat and
othe