Breakdown of Fourier's Law in Nanotube Thermal Conductors

Breakdown of Fourier’s Law in Nanotube Thermal Conductors

C. W. Chang, D. Okawa, H. Garcia, A. Majumdar, and A. Zettl

Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 075903 – Published 15 August 2008

Abstract

We present experimental evidence that the room temperature thermal conductivity ( $κ$ ) of individual multiwalled carbon and boron-nitride nanotubes does not obey Fourier’s empirical law of thermal conduction. Because of isotopic disorder, $κ$ ’s of carbon nanotubes and boron-nitride nanotubes show different length dependence behavior. Moreover, for these systems we find that Fourier’s law is violated even when the phonon mean free path is much shorter than the sample length.

Received 11 March 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.075903

Authors & Affiliations

C. W. Chang^1,2,*, D. Okawa¹, H. Garcia¹, A. Majumdar^2,3,4, and A. Zettl^1,2,4,†

¹Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, California 94720, USA
²Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, University of California at Berkeley, California 94720, USA
³Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, California 94720, USA
⁴Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

^*chihwei@berkeley.edu
^†azettl@berkeley.edu

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Vol. 101, Iss. 7 — 15 August 2008

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