A General and Predictive Understanding of Thermal Transport from 1D- and 2D-Confined Nanostructures: Theory and Experiment

Heat management is crucial in the design of nanoscale devices as the operating temperature determines their efficiency and lifetime. Past experimental and theoretical works exploring nanoscale heat transport in semiconductors addressed known deviations from Fourier's law modeling by including effective parameters, such as a size-dependent thermal conductivity. However, recent experiments have qualitatively shown behavior that cannot be modeled in this way. Here, we combine advanced experiment and theory to show that the cooling of 1D- and 2D-confined nanoscale hot spots on silicon can be described using a general hydrodynamic heat transport model, contrary to previous understanding of heat flow in bulk silicon. We use a comprehensive set of extreme ultraviolet scatterometry measurements of nondiffusive transport from transiently heated nanolines and nanodots to validate and generalize our ab initio model, that does not need any geometry-dependent fitting parameters. This allows us to uncover the existence of two distinct time scales and heat transport mechanisms: an interface resistance regime that dominates on short time scales and a hydrodynamic-like phonon transport regime that dominates on longer time scales. Moreover, our model can predict the full thermomechanical response on nanometer length scales and picosecond time scales for arbitrary geometries, providing an advanced practical tool for thermal management of nanoscale technologies. Furthermore, we derive analytical expressions for the transport time scales, valid for a subset of geometries, supplying a route for optimizing heat dissipation.

Observation of second sound in a rapidly varying temperature field in Ge

Second sound is known as the thermal transport regime where heat is carried by temperature waves. Its experimental observation was previously restricted to a small number of materials, usually in rather narrow temperature windows. We show that it is possible to overcome these limitations by driving the system with a rapidly varying temperature field. High-frequency second sound is demonstrated in bulk natural Ge between 7 K and room temperature by studying the phase lag of the thermal response under a harmonic high-frequency external thermal excitation and addressing the relaxation time and the propagation velocity of the heat waves. These results provide a route to investigate the potential of wave-like heat transport in almost any material, opening opportunities to control heat through its oscillatory nature.

Collective thermal transport in pure and alloy semiconductors

Suppressing collective effects from momentum-conserving phonon collisions cause fast drop in thermal conductivity at small semiconductor alloy impurity concentrations.

Non-local effects in radial heat transport in silicon thin layers and graphene sheets

We explore non-local effects in radially symmetric heat transport in silicon thin layers and in graphene sheets. In contrast to one-dimensional perturbations, which may be well described by means of the Fourier law with a suitable effective thermal conductivity, two-dimensional radial situations may exhibit a more complicated behaviour, not reducible to an effective Fourier law. In particular, a hump in the temperature profile is predicted for radial distances shorter than the mean-free path of heat carriers. This hump is forbidden by the local-equilibrium theory, but it is allowed in more general thermodynamic theories, and therefore it may have a special interest regarding the formulation of the second law in ballistic heat transport.

Computer simulation study of irreversible adsorption: coverage fluctuations

In this paper, we develop a cellular automata model to study the coverage fluctuations in monolayers of irreversible adsorbed particles. The effect of bulk diffusion and excluded volume interactions between adsorbed and incoming particles on coverage fluctuations is analyzed by simulations and analytically. We also show that the macroscopic boundary and initial conditions imposed at the system (open or closed cell) determine the effect of these factors on coverage fluctuations. In fact, under certain conditions, the excluded volume interactions only influence fluctuations near the jamming limit.

Irreversible adsorption of diffusing hard disks: an effective medium approach

We propose an effective medium theory to analyze the kinetics of nonsequential adsorption of colloidal particles, including transport and blocking effects, valid at all values of surface coverage. The theory is applied to the irreversible adsorption of diffusing hard disks obtaining a kinetic law, which is in excellent agreement with nonsequential computer simulations at all densities of adsorbed particles.