Computational study of heat transport in compositionally disordered binary crystals

Abstract

The thermal conductivity of compositionally disordered binary crystals with atoms interacting through Lennard-Jones potentials has been studied as a function of temperature. The two species in the crystal differ in mass, hard-core atomic diameter, well depth and relative concentration. The isobaric Monte Carlo was used to equilibrate the samples at near-zero pressure. The isoenergy molecular dynamics combined with the Green–Kubo approach was taken to calculate the heat current time-dependent autocorrelation function and determine the lattice thermal conductivity of the sample. The inverse temperature dependence of the lattice thermal conductivity was shown to fail at low temperatures when the atomic diameters of the two species differ. Instead, the thermal conductivity was nearly a constant across temperatures for species with different atomic diameters. Overall, it is shown that there is a dramatic decrease of the lattice thermal conductivity with increasing atomic radii ratio between species and a moderate decrease due to mass disorder.