Atomistic simulations of heat transport in real-scale silicon nanowire devices

Abstract

Utilizing atomistic lattice dynamics and scattering theory, we study thermal transport in nanodevices made of 10 nm thick silicon nanowires, from 10 to 100 nm long, sandwiched between two bulk reservoirs. We find that thermal transport in devices differs significantly from that of suspended extended nanowires, due to phonon scattering at the contact interfaces. We show that thermal conductance and the phonon transport regime can be tuned from ballistic to diffusive by varying the surface roughness of the nanowires and their length. In devices containing short crystalline wires phonon tunneling occurs and enhances the conductance beyond that of single contacts.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Energy Dissipation and Transport in Nanoscale Devices
• Impact of Phonon Surface Roughness Scattering on Thermal Conductivity of Thin Si Nanowires
• Coherent phonon scattering effects on thermal transport in thin semiconductor nanowires
• Atomistic simulations of heat transport in real-scale silicon nanowire devices

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Phonon Heat Conduction in Corrugated Silicon Nanowires Below the Casimir Limit
• Non-Fourier heat transport in nanosystems
• Thermal Transport Across Graphene Step Junctions
• Atomistic simulations of heat transport in real-scale silicon nanowire devices
• Advances in the optimization of silicon-based thermoelectrics: a theory perspective