A Universal Gauge for Thermal Conductivity of Silicon Nanowires With Different Cross Sectional Geometries

Abstract

By using molecular dynamics simulations, we study thermal conductivity of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) with different cross sectional geometries. It is found that thermal conductivity decreases monotonically with the increase of surface-to-volume ratio (SVR). More interestingly, a simple universal linear dependence of thermal conductivity on SVR is observed for SiNWs with modest cross sectional area (larger than 20 nm^2), regardless of the cross sectional geometry. As a result, among different shaped SiNWs with the same cross sectional area, the one with triangular cross section has the lowest thermal conductivity. Our study provides not only a universal gauge for thermal conductivity among different cross sectional geometries, but also a designing guidance to tune thermal conductivity by geometry.

22 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Anomalous Heat Conduction and Anomalous Diffusion in Low Dimensional Nanoscale Systems
• Impacts of Atomistic Coating on Thermal Conductivity of Germanium Nanowires
• Engineering the thermal conductivity along an individual silicon nanowire by selective helium ion irradiation
• Thermoelectric Effects and Topological Insulators