Abstract

Semiconductor superlattices can play a significant role in the control of physical properties in modern electronic devices. The wave-particle crossover that the phonons can experience in the process of heat transport is one of the most interesting mechanisms related to this class of materials. However, if on the one hand this is due to the fact that translational symmetry governs transport properties in superlattices, on the other hand an unconventional symmetry may provide a new opportunity to achieve surprising results. In this work, we perform non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to investigate phonon heat transport in quasiperiodic superlattices of graphene-boron nitride, alternating their domains according to the Thue–Morse and Double-Period sequences. Our results reveal that coherent heat transport is suppressed for higher generations of both sequences, similarly to what we recently observed for quasiperiodic graphene-hBN nanoribbons following the Fibonacci sequence. This suppression is caused by the increase of the superlattice period (or quasiperiodic generation) which can lead to phonon localization for different wavelengths, reducing the lattice thermal conductivity. We also obtain a general expression for the thermal conductivity as a function of quasiperiodic generation and supercell size for each of the sequences. These findings open up new horizons for the understanding of thermal transport in quasiperiodic nanomaterials.

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