Thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal conductivity of complex boron nitride nanoribbons

Abstract

Aiming at developing insulating materials with high thermal conductivity (TC), which can make up for the shortcoming that graphene cannot be used directly in electronic devices because of its zero band gap, we systematically study the thermal transport of the hexagonal boron nitride nanoribbons (BNNRs) composed of one multilayer central region (CR) and two monolayer regions (MRs). We show that the TC and the interfacial thermal conductivity (ITC) depend on the BNNR structure parameters and the temperature in different ways. As the CR layer number increases the ITC will decrease, indicating the two-layer BNNR will show the largest ITC. The TC will increase and the ITC will fluctuate around a certain value with increasing the MR length. However, with the increase of the BNNR width, both TC and ITC will show oscillations near certain values. Furthermore, we find that the ITC (TC) will increase (decrease) with the temperature increasing. Finally, we calculate the ITC of the compound BNNRs in different stacking manners and find the ITC for the AB stacking is greater than that for the AA stacking. This research presents the possible measures for manipulating heat transport and demonstrates that the whole heat transport performance is fundamentally determined by the interfaces.