Monte Carlo study of temperature-dependent non-diffusive thermal transport in Si nanowires

Abstract

Non-diffusive thermal transport has gained extensive research interest recently due to its important implications on fundamental understanding of material’s phonon mean free path distributions and many nanoscale energy applications. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of boundary scattering and nanowire length on the non-diffusive thermal transport in thin silicon nanowires by rigorously solving the phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) using a variance reduced Monte Carlo technique across a range of temperatures. The simulations use the complete phonon dispersion and spectral lifetime data obtained from first-principle density function theory calculations as input without any adjustable parameters. Our BTE simulation results show that the nanowire length plays an important role in determining the thermal conductivity of silicon nanowires. In addition, our simulation results suggest significant phonon confinement effect for the previously measured silicon nanowires. These findings are important for a comprehensive understanding of microscopic non-diffusive thermal transport in silicon nanowires.