Reply to "Comment on `Low-temperature phonon thermal conductivity of single-crystalline NdCuO: Effects of sample size and surface roughness' " by Sun et al
arXiv:0904.1929 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.79.176502
Abstract
In their comment \cite{Sun} on our study of phonon heat transport in NdCuO \cite{Li}, Sun and Ando estimate that the phonon mean free path at low temperature is roughly half the width of the single crystal used in our study, from which they argue that phonon scattering cannot be dominated by sample boundaries. Here we show that their use of specific heat data on NdCuO, which contains a large magnetic contribution at low temperature that is difficult to reliably extract, leads to an underestimate of the mean free path by a factor two compared to an estimate based on the specific heat data of the non-magnetic isostructural analog PrCuO. This removes the apparent contradiction raised by Sun and Ando.
1 page, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B