0000000000123937
AUTHOR
F. X. Alvarez
From kinetic to collective behavior in thermal transport on semiconductors and semiconductor nanostructures
We present a model which deepens into the role that normal scattering has on the thermal conductivity in semiconductor bulk, micro and nanoscale samples. Thermal conductivity as a function of the temperature undergoes a smooth transition from a kinetic to a collective regime that depends on the importance of normal scattering events. We demonstrate that in this transition, the key point to fit experimental data is changing the way to perform the average on the scattering rates. We apply the model to bulk Si with different isotopic compositions obtaining an accurate fit. Then we calculate the thermal conductivity of Si thin films and nanowires by only introducing the effective size as additi…
Heat solitons and thermal transfer of information along thin wires
Abstract The aim of this paper is to consider soliton propagation of heat signals along a cylinder whose heat exchange with the environment is a non-linear function of the difference of temperatures of the cylinder and the environment and whose heat transfer along the system is described by the Maxwell–Cattaneo equation. To find the soliton solutions we use the auxiliary equation method. Our motivation is to obtain and compare the speed of propagation, the maximum rate of information transfer, and the energy necessary for the transfer of one bit of information for different solitons, by assuming that a localized soliton may carry a bit of information. It is shown that a given total power (e…
Thermal conductivity of group-IV Semiconductors from a Kinetic-Collective Model
The thermal conductivity of group-IV semiconductors (silicon, germanium, diamond and grey tin) with several isotopic compositions has been calculated from a kinetic-collective model. From this approach, significantly different to Callaway-like models in its physical interpretation, the thermal conductivity expression accounts for a transition from a kinetic (individual phonon transport) to a collective (hydrodynamic phonon transport) behaviour of the phonon field. Within the model, we confirm the theoretical proportionality between the phonon–phonon relaxation times of the group-IV semiconductors. This proportionality depends on some materials properties and it allows us to predict the ther…
Thermal solitons along wires with flux-limited lateral exchange
We obtain some exact solutions in the context of solitons, for heat conduction with inertia along a cylinder whose heat exchange with the environment is a non-linear function of the difference of temperatures of the cylinder and the environment, due to a flux-limiter behavior of the exchange. We study the consequences of heat transfer and information transfer along the wire, and we compare the situation with analogous solitons found in nonlinear lateral radiative exchange studied in some previous papers. We also find further exact solutions in terms of Weierstrass elliptic functions for the sake of completeness.