Thermal elastic-wave attenuation in low-dimensional SiNx bars at low temperatures

Abstract

At low temperatures, <200 mK, the thermal flux through low-dimensional amorphous dielectric bars, <2 μm wide and 200 nm thick, is transported by a small number of low-order elastic modes. For long bars, L > 400 μm, it is known that the conductance scales as 1/L, where L is the length, but for short bars, 1 μm < L < 400 μm, the length dependence is poorly known. Although it is assumed that the transport must exhibit a diffusive to ballistic transition, the functional form of the transition and the scale size over which the transition occurs have not, to our knowledge, been measured. In this paper, we use ultra-low-noise superconducting Transition Edge Sensors to measure the heat flux through a set of SiNx bars to establish the characteristic scale size of the ballistic to diffusive transition. For bars supporting 6 to 7 modes, we measure a thermal elastic-wave attenuation length of 20 μm. The measurement is important because it sheds light on the scattering processes, which in turn are closely related to the generation of thermal fluctuation noise. Our own interest lies in creating patterned phononic filters for controlling heat flow and thermal noise in ultra-low-noise devices, but the work will be of interest to others trying to isolate devices from their environments and studying loss mechanisms in micro-mechanical resonators.