Ryoto Yanagisawa

Heat conduction tuning by wave nature of phonons

Perfectly periodic structures modify the transport properties of heat carriers by interference effect and hinder heat transport. The world communicates to our senses of vision, hearing, and touch in the language of waves, because light, sound, and even heat essentially consist of microscopic vibrations of different media. The wave nature of light and sound has been extensively investigated over the past century and is now widely used in modern technology. However, the wave nature of heat has been the subject of mostly theoretical studies because its experimental demonstration, let alone practical use, remains challenging due to its extremely short wavelengths. We show a possibility to use the wave nature of heat for thermal conductivity tuning via spatial short-range order in phononic crystal nanostructures. Our experimental and theoretical results suggest that interference of thermal phonons occurs in strictly periodic nanostructures and slows the propagation of heat. This finding expands the methodology of heat transfer engineering to the wave nature of heat.

Impact of limiting dimension on thermal conductivity of one-dimensional silicon phononic crystals

We present experimental and theoretical investigations on the roles of the limiting dimensions, such as the smallest dimension, surface roughness, and density of holes in the reduction of thermal conductivity of one-dimensional phononic nanostructures at temperatures of 4 and 295 K. We discover that the thermal conductivity does not strongly depend on the period of the phononic crystal nanostructures whereas the surface roughness and the smallest dimension of the structure—the neck—play the most important roles in thermal conductivity reduction. Surface roughness is a very important structural parameter in nanostructures with a characteristic length less than 100 nm in silicon. The importance of the roughness increases as the neck size decreases, and the thermal conductivity of the structure can differ by a factor of four, reaching the thermal conductivity of a small nanowire. The experimental data are analyzed using the Callaway–Holland model of Boltzmann equation and Monte Carlo simulation providing dee...

Thermal phonon transport in Si thin film with dog-leg shaped asymmetric nanostructures

Thermal phonon transport in single-crystalline Si thin films with dog-leg shaped nanostructures was investigated. Thermal conductivities for the forward and backward directions were measured and compared at 5 and 295 K by micro thermoreflectance. The Si thin film with dog-leg shaped nanostructures showed lower thermal conductivities than those of nanowires and two-dimensional phononic crystals with circular holes at the same surface-to-volume ratio. However, asymmetric thermal conductivity was not observed at small temperature gradient condition in spite of the highly asymmetric shape though the size of the pattern is within thermal phonon mean free path range. We conclude that strong temperature dependent thermal conductivity is required to observe the asymmetric thermal phonon conduction in monolithic materials with asymmetric nanostructures.