Breaking Rayleigh's law with spatially correlated disorder to control phonon transport

Abstract

Controlling thermal transport in insulators and semiconductors is crucial for many technological fields such as thermoelectrics and thermal insulation, for which a low thermal conductivity ($\kappa$) is desirable. A major obstacle for realizing low $\kappa$ materials is Rayleigh's law, which implies that acoustic phonons, which carry most of the heat, are insensitive to scattering by point defects at low energy. We demonstrate, with large scale simulations on tens of millions of atoms, that isotropic long-range spatial correlations in the defect distribution can dramatically reduce phonon lifetimes of important low-frequency heat-carrying modes, leading to a large reduction of $\kappa$ -- potentially an order of magnitude at room temperature. We propose a general and quantitative framework for controlling thermal transport in complex functional materials through structural spatial correlations, and we establish the optimal functional form of spatial correlations that minimize $\kappa$. We end by briefly discussing experimental realizations of various correlated structures.

References in corpus (14)

• The Kernel Polynomial Method
• Unified theory of thermal transport in crystals and disordered solids
• Calculation of nanowire thermal conductivity using complete phonon dispersion relations
• The "Coulomb phase" in frustrated systems
• Modeling heat transport in crystals and glasses from a unified lattice-dynamical approach
• The role of lighter and heavier embedded nanoparticles on the thermal conductivity of SiGe alloys
• Gallium Arsenide Thermal Conductivity and Optical Phonon Relaxation Times from First-Principles Calculations
• Critical delocalization of chiral zero energy modes in graphene
• Design of crystal-like aperiodic solids with selective disorder--phonon coupling
• Anomalous transport in low-dimensional systems with correlated disorder
• Mie Scattering of Phonons by Point Defects in IV-VI Semiconductors PbTe and GeTe
• Dramatic effects of vacancies on phonon lifetime and thermal conductivity in graphene
• Success and breakdown of the T-matrix approximation for phonon-disorder scattering
• Perturbation theory and thermal transport in mass-disordered alloys: Insights from Green's function methods

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Resonant phonons: Localization in a structurally ordered crystal
• Bias driven circular current in a ring nanojunction: Critical role of environmental interaction