Effects of alloying on in-plane thermal conductivity and thermal boundary conductance in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers

Abstract

Two-dimensional 1H transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) provide a platform, analogous to group IV cubic semiconductor alloys (${\mathrm{Si}}_{1\ensuremath{-}x}\mathrm{Ge}$), that enables systematic investigations on the effects of alloying in 2D material systems. The existing literature on TMD alloys explores their electrical, magnetic, and optical properties, but lacks a comprehensive analysis of thermal transport in supported and nanostructured systems. Here we employ first-principles-driven phonon Boltzmann transport formalism and a 2D-3D thermal boundary conductance model to systematically study in-plane and cross-plane phonon transport of suspended and ${\mathrm{SiO}}_{2}$ supported single-layer TMD alloys. We find that the thermal conductivity of alloyed TMDs is dependent on system size up to tens of microns and that the combination of mass-difference and substrate scattering can significantly reduce thermal transport even in large systems ($g500$ nm). Beyond in-plane transport, we find that the thermal boundary conductance displays a qualitatively different trend and significantly weaker modulation with alloy composition as compared to the thermal conductivity. Our results help shed light on the in-plane and cross-plane thermal transport properties of 2D single-layer TMD alloys and further their applications in nanoelectronics, sensing, and energy devices.