Chirality and thickness-dependent thermal conductivity of few-layer graphene: A molecular dynamics study

Abstract

The thermal conductivity of graphene nanoribbons (layer from 1 to 8 atomic planes) is investigated by using the nonequilibrium molecular dynamics method. We present that the room-temperature thermal conductivity decays monotonically with the number of the layers in few-layer graphene. The superiority of zigzag graphene in thermal conductivity is only available in high temperature region and disappears in multilayer case. It is explained that the phonon spectral shrink in high frequency induces the change in thermal conductivity. It is also reported that single-layer graphene has better ballistic transport property than the multilayer graphene.