Thermal Conductance of Thin Silicon Nanowires

Renkun Chen, Allon I. Hochbaum, Padraig Murphy, Joel Moore, Peidong Yang, and Arun Majumdar

Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 105501 – Published 2 September 2008

Abstract

The thermal conductance of individual single crystalline silicon nanowires with diameters less than 30 nm has been measured from 20 to 100 K. The observed thermal conductance shows unusual linear temperature dependence at low temperatures, as opposed to the $T^{3}$ dependence predicted by the conventional phonon transport model. In contrast to previous models, the present study suggests that phonon-boundary scattering is highly frequency dependent, and ranges from nearly ballistic to completely diffusive, which can explain the unexpected linear temperature dependence.

Received 11 February 2008

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.105501

Authors & Affiliations

Renkun Chen¹, Allon I. Hochbaum², Padraig Murphy³, Joel Moore^3,5, Peidong Yang^2,4,5, and Arun Majumdar^1,4,5,*

¹Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
²Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
³Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
⁴Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
⁵Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

^*Corresponding author. majumdar@me.berkeley.edu

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Issue

Vol. 101, Iss. 10 — 5 September 2008

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