Acoustic Phonon Thermal Transport through a Nanostructure

Abstract

Using the scattering matrix method, we investigate the thermal transportin a nanostructure at low temperatures. It is found that phonontransport exhibits some novel and interesting features: resonanttransmission, resonant reflection, and small thermal conductance. Acomparison between thermal conductances is performed when stress-freeand hard-wall boundary conditions are applied for acoustic modes,respectively. The result indicates that the characteristics of thethermal conductance versus temperature for different types of boundaryconditions are qualitatively different.