Heat transport in the periodically confined geometries of silicon metalattices

ORAL

Abstract

The insertion of voids of nanometer size in semiconductors provides an effective and widely applicable approach to control their thermal conductivities. We have studied the thermal properties of silicon metalattices, which consist of an array of nanometer-sized pores inserted into crystalline silicon. The heat conductivity of these nanostructures has been calculated as a function of the arrangement and radius of the pores using Green-Kubo techniques with a modified Stillinger-Weber potential, revealing an extreme reduction in the thermal conductivity of two orders of magnitude for pore radii in the range of 1 to 10 nm. We have carried out a phonon-resolved analysis to explain thermal conductance of silicon metalattices and to examine its strong nonlinear dependence as a function of the volume fraction of the pores. This analysis provides guidelines for designing semiconducting nanostructures with minimal lattice thermal conductivities towards improving heat management in microelectronics and energy conversion in thermoelectrics.

*We acknowledge the financial support from the National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center for Nanoscale Science at Penn State University under grant NSF–DMR 1420620.

Presenters

  • Weinan Chen

    • Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ

Authors

  • Weinan Chen

    • Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ
  • Disha Talreja

    • Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ
  • Hiu Yan Cheng

    • Department of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University
  • Gerald Mahan

    • Department of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
  • Vincent Crespi

    • Physics, Pennsylvania State Univ
    • Pennsylvania State Univ
    • Pennsylvania State University
    • Physics Department, Pennsylvania State Univ
    • Physics, Pennsylvania State University
    • Department of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
  • John Badding

    • Department of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University
    • Pennsylvania State Univ
  • Venkatraman Gopalan

    • Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ
    • Materials Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University
    • Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ
    • Materials Science and Engineering, Penn State University
  • Ismaila Dabo

    • MATSE, Penn State University-University Park
    • Materials Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University
    • Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State Univ