The effect of boron doping on the thermal conductivity of zigzag carbon nanotubes

Abstract

The temperature behavior of thermal conductivity of zigzag carbon nanotube (CNT) doped with boron atoms, as acceptor impurities, has been investigated in the context of tight binding model hamiltonian. A local energy term is added to the hamiltonian of the original clean system in order to obtain the effect of scattering of the electrons from impurities on the electronic spectrum. Green's function approach has been implemented to find the behavior of thermal conductivity of CNTs within linear response theory. Depending on the temperature regions, thermal conductivity shows two different behaviors. Thermal transport is found to be decreasing with dopant concentration at low temperatures. It is not the case of higher temperatures where thermal conductivity rises due to increase of boron concentration.