Abstract
In modern information technology, as integration density increases rapidly and the dimension of materials reduces to nanoscale, interfacial thermal transport (ITT) has attracted widespread attention of scientists. This review introduces the latest theoretical development in ITT through one-dimensional (1D) atomic junction model to address the thermal transport across an interface. With full consideration of the atomic structures in interfaces, people can apply the 1D atomic junction model to investigate many properties of ITT, such as interfacial (Kapitza) resistance, nonlinear interface, interfacial rectification and phonon interference, etc. For the ballistic ITT, both the scattering boundary method and the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) method can be applied, which are exact since atomic details of actual interfaces are considered. For interfacial coupling case, explicit analytical expression of transmission coefficient can be obtained and it is found that the thermal conductance maximizes at certain interfacial coupling (harmonic mean of the spring constants of the two leads) and the transmission coefficient is not a monotonic decreasing function of phonon frequency. With nonlinear interaction -- phonon-phonon interaction or electron-phonon interaction at interface, the NEGF method provides an efficient way to study the ITT. It is found that at weak linear interfacial coupling, the nonlinearity can improve the ITT, but it depresses the ITT in the case of strong-linear-coupling. In addition, the nonlinear interfacial coupling can induce thermal rectification effect. For interfacial materials case which can be simulated by a two-junction atomic chain, phonons show interference effect, and an optimized thermal coupler can be obtained by tuning its spring constant and atomic mass.
Highlights
In the development of microelectronic devices, accumulation of heat becomes a bottleneck because of a fast-growing power density
This review introduces the latest theoretical development in interfacial thermal transport (ITT) through one-dimensional (1D) atomic junction model to address the thermal transport across an interface
As the dimensions of systems shrink into the nanoscale, interfaces dramatically affect thermal transport (Alexeev et al, 2015; Chen et al, 2015, 2016), it is of great importance to study the interfacial thermal transport (ITT) in nanoscale (Cahill et al, 2014; Gordiz and Henry, 2015)
Summary
In the development of microelectronic devices, accumulation of heat becomes a bottleneck because of a fast-growing power density. Two extensively used approaches are the acoustic mismatch model, proposed by Little (1959) to study the perfect interface without scattering between two dissimilar solids, and the diffuse mismatch model, developed by Swartz and Pohl (1989) and more applicable to investigate the non-perfect interface with complete diffusive scattering Both of them need to be improved on accuracy in calculating the interfacial thermal resistance (Zhang et al, 2016), since they do not consider the atomic details in actual interface structures (Reddy et al, 2005; Stevens et al, 2005).
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