Thermal conductivity reduction in an individual single crystalline Bi nanowire by size effect

Abstract

We measured thermal conductivity of an individual single-crystalline Bi nanowire grown by a spontaneous growth method. The measured thermal conductivity (¿) for 98 nm diameter Bi nanowire is about 1.6 W/m·K at 300 K, which is much lower than that of bulk Bi (¿ for bulk Bi ¿ 8 W/m-K at 300 K). This indicates that the thermal conductivity of Bi nanowires is suppressed by the strong phonon boundary scattering.