Navaneetha K. Ravichandran

Coherent and Incoherent Thermal Transport in Nanomeshes

Coherent thermal transport in nanopatterned structures is a topic of considerable interest, but whether it occurs in certain structures remains unclear due to a poor understanding of which phonons conduct heat. Here, we perform fully three-dimensional, frequency-dependent simulations of thermal transport in nanomeshes by solving the Boltzmann transport equation with an efficient Monte Carlo method. From the spectral information in our simulations, we show that thermal transport in nanostructures that can be created with available lithographic techniques is dominated by incoherent boundary scattering at room temperature. Our result provides important insights into the conditions required for coherent thermal transport to occur in artificial structures.

Experimental metrology to obtain thermal phonon transmission coefficients at solid interfaces

Interfaces play an essential role in phonon-mediated heat conduction in solids, impacting applications ranging from thermoelectric waste heat recovery to heat dissipation in electronics. From the microscopic perspective, interfacial phonon transport is described by transmission coefficients that link vibrational modes in the materials composing the interface. However, direct experimental determination of these coefficients is challenging because most experiments provide a mode-averaged interface conductance that obscures the microscopic detail. Here, we report a metrology to extract thermal phonon transmission coefficients at solid interfaces using ab initio phonon transport modeling and a thermal characterization technique, time-domain thermoreflectance. In combination with transmission electron microscopy characterization of the interface, our approach allows us to link the atomic structure of an interface to the spectral content of the heat crossing it. Our work provides a useful perspective on the microscopic processes governing interfacial heat conduction.

Unusual high thermal conductivity in boron arsenide bulk crystals

Moving the heat aside with BAs Thermal management becomes increasingly important as we decrease device size and increase computing power. Engineering materials with high thermal conductivity, such as boron arsenide (BAs), is hard because it is essential to avoid defects and impurities during synthesis, which would stop heat flow. Three different research groups have synthesized BAs with a thermal conductivity around 1000 watts per meter-kelvin: Kang et al., Li et al., and Tian et al. succeeded in synthesizing high-purity BAs with conductivities half that of diamond but more than double that of conventional metals (see the Perspective by Dames). The advance validates the search for high-thermal-conductivity materials and provides a new material that may be more easily integrated into semiconducting devices. Science, this issue p. 575, p. 579, p. 582; see also p. 549 Boron arsenide has an ultrahigh thermal conductivity, making it competitive with diamond for thermal management applications. Conventional theory predicts that ultrahigh lattice thermal conductivity can only occur in crystals composed of strongly bonded light elements, and that it is limited by anharmonic three-phonon processes. We report experimental evidence that departs from these long-held criteria. We measured a local room-temperature thermal conductivity exceeding 1000 watts per meter-kelvin and an average bulk value reaching 900 watts per meter-kelvin in bulk boron arsenide (BAs) crystals, where boron and arsenic are light and heavy elements, respectively. The high values are consistent with a proposal for phonon-band engineering and can only be explained by higher-order phonon processes. These findings yield insight into the physics of heat conduction in solids and show BAs to be the only known semiconductor with ultrahigh thermal conductivity.

Role of thermalizing and nonthermalizing walls in phonon heat conduction along thin films

Phonon boundary scattering is typically treated using the Fuchs-Sondheimer theory, which assumes that phonons are thermalized to the local temperature at the boundary. However, whether such a thermalization process actually occurs and its effect on thermal transport remains unclear. Here we examine thermal transport along thin films with both thermalizing and non-thermalizing walls by solving the spectral Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) for steady state and transient transport. We find that in steady state, the thermal transport is governed by the Fuchs-Sondheimer theory and is insensitive to whether the boundaries are thermalizing or not. In contrast, under transient conditions, the thermal decay rates are significantly different for thermalizing and non-thermalizing walls. We also show that, for transient transport, the thermalizing boundary condition is unphysical due to violation of heat flux conservation at the boundaries. Our results provide insights into the boundary scattering process of thermal phonons over a range of heating length scales that are useful for interpreting thermal measurements on nanostructures.