Examining the microscopic origin of a computationally inexpensive thermal-conductivity-based indicator for phonon hydrodynamics

Abstract

Hydrodynamic heat flow, where out-of-equilibrium phonons collectively drift in response to a temperature gradient, has attracted renewed interest following its experimental observation in graphite from cryogenic to room temperatures. To rapidly screen for other materials exhibiting this unconventional non-Fourier regime, the computationally inexpensive thermal conductivity ratio ${\kappa }_{LPBE}/{\kappa }_{RTA}$ obtained from a complete solution of the linearized Peierls-Boltzmann equation (LPBE) for phonon transport and the relaxation time approximation (RTA) for phonon decay, has often been used as an indicator for phonon hydrodynamics. Yet, a clear connection between ${\kappa }_{LPBE}/{\kappa }_{RTA}$ and the signatures of drifting hydrodynamic phonon populations has not been established in the literature. Here we show that ${\kappa }_{LPBE}/{\kappa }_{RTA}$ directly correlates with the microscopic hydrodynamic signatures arising from the spectral properties of the phonon collision operator, which is often computationally expensive to compute, thus establishing the former as a reliable low-cost indicator for phonon hydrodynamics. On the other hand, other indicators in the literature that are derived only from the phonon scattering rates do not correlate with ${\kappa }_{LPBE}/{\kappa }_{RTA}$, and so, are inadequate to predict phonon hydrodynamics. Our study also reveals that ${\kappa }_{LPBE}/{\kappa }_{RTA}$, and therefore the strength of hydrodynamic signatures, decrease with increasing Brillouin zone (BZ) sampling density for several ultrahigh-$\kappa$ materials at low temperatures, thus underscoring the need for careful BZ sampling for robust predictions of phonon hydrodynamics. Our work justifies the use of ${\kappa }_{LPBE}/{\kappa }_{RTA}$ as a computationally inexpensive indicator of phonon hydrodynamics, thus enabling accelerated search for new materials that exhibit such unconventional heat flow regimes.