Diffusive nature of thermal transport in stanene

Abstract

Using the phonon Boltzmann transport formalism and density functional theory based calculations, we show that stanene has a low thermal conductivity. For a sample size of 1$\times$1 $\mu$m${}^2$ ($L\times W$), the lattice thermal conductivities along the zigzag and armchair directions are 10.83 W/m-K and 9.2 W/m-K respectively, at room temperature, indicating anisotropy in the thermal transport. The low values of thermal conductivity are due to large anharmonicity in the crystal resulting in high Grüneisen parameters, and low group velocities. The room temperature effective phonon mean free path is found to be around 17 nm indicating that the thermal transport in stanene is completely diffusive in nature. Furthermore, our study brings out the relative importance of the contributing phonon branches and reveals that, at very low temperatures, the contribution to lattice thermal conductivity comes from the flexural acoustic (ZA) branch and at higher temperatures it is dominated by the longitudinal acoustic (LA) branch. We also show that lattice thermal conductivity of stanene can further be reduced by tuning the sample size and creating rough surfaces at the edges. Such tunability in the lattice thermal conductivity in stanene suggests its applications in thermoelectric devices.

References in corpus (10)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Epitaxial Growth of Two-Dimensional Stanene
• Phase coexistence and metal-insulator transition in few-layer phosphorene: A computational study
• Enhanced Thermoelectric Performance and Anomalous Seebeck Effects in Topological Insulators
• Ballistic to diffusive crossover of heat flow in graphene ribbons
• Prediction of Near-Room-Temperature Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect on Honeycomb Materials
• First-Principles Prediction of Phononic Thermal Conductivity of Silicene: a Comparison with Graphene
• Substrate Coupling Suppresses Size Dependence of Thermal Conductivity in Supported Graphene
• Thermal conductance of graphene and dimerite
• Phonon Properties, Thermal Expansion, and Thermomechanics of Silicene and Germanene

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Unexpected phonon-transport properties of stanene among 2D group-IV materials from \textit{ab initio}