Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but a heat sink uses a process called thermal transfer. What this does, is transfers heat from a chip to the air, dissipating it and protecting the chip from heat damage.
Heatsink uses what they call passive cooling where as liquid cooling systems use active cooling.
It's the process in which a heat sink dissipates heat
it is called respiration.
This process is called photosynthesis.
The process is called dehydration.
It is called Thermal Compound.
Plants in the process called photosynthesis.
Try this DIY on removing a CPU/GPU heatsink...
This process is known as photosynthesis.
One, the main, method is a process called feedback; and the process occurs in something called a 'feedback loop'.
In a active heatsink system you have both a heatsink and a fan thus for the most part an active heatsink cools better with one exception. Should the fan fail the active heatsink will quickly overheat. Passive heatsinks relay on transferring heat without the aid of a fan. The advantage here is that a passive heatsink is fail proof and uses 0 electricity, however passive heatsinks don't typical cool as well. Passive heatsinks work great for supporting chips and RAM cooling. They are also found in servers because of the no fail aspect. EnzoTech produces some passive heatsinks you can read a bit more about them here: http://electricalninja.com/
The Retina