Study of Thermal Conductivity of Si Nanowires with micro-Raman Spectroscopy

Nanowires have played an increasingly important role in thermoelectric technology due to their high figure of merit ZT resulting from the reduced thermal conductivity, K, and good electrical conductivity. In this work, we report the measurement of K of individual silicon nanowires (SiNWs) by mapping Raman temperature profiles along the testing nanowires using a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) device and a micro-Raman system with a 530 nm laser beam. Thermal conductivity was measured as a function of uniaxial tensile stress applied to the SiNWs, which was varied from 0 to 1.2 GPa. The measured K results for the unstrained nanowires agree well with the predictions based on diffuse phonon boundary scattering. The dependence of SiNWs' thermal conductivity on engineering stress can provide significant information for nanowires fabrication.