Two-dimensional
layered materials show promising applications in
miniaturized devices, such as transistors, spintronics, and field
emitters. However, substantial thermal management issues, including
thermal mismatch and thermal stress, may degrade device performance.
To address such challenges, the thermal expansion (TE) anisotropy
determined by the structure feature of layered material needs to be
well understood. Here, we propose two new descriptors to evaluate
the TE behavior of layered materials, namely the axial elastic deviation
factor σ
i
and the axial net thermal
stress f
i
along the ith direction. The former, defined as the normalized elastic
element difference of material elastic tensor C and compliance
tensor S, can distinguish whether the thermal expansion
of a material is driven by phonons (with small σ
i
) or elastic property (with large σ
i
) with few computational costs. The latter, axial
stress (in GPa/K) induced by temperature, shows an accurate determination
of the positive or negative thermal expansion along different in-plane
directions of layered materials. Based on the analysis of descriptors,
we found that PtS2 and PtSe2 are featured with
a larger axial elastic deviation factor (>23%). Considering the
elastic
property, we for the first time report the in-plane negative thermal
expansion in PtS2 (−1.2 ppm/K) and PtSe2 (−0.8 ppm/K). Our work provides a unified understanding of
TE causes of layered materials via effective descriptors, which can
serve as a guideline for high-throughput screening of thermal expansion
materials and subsequent device design.