Heat Transport Control and Thermal Characterization of Low-Dimensional Materials: A Review

Abstract

Heat dissipation and thermal management are central challenges in various areas of science and technology and are critical issues for the majority of nanoelectronic devices. In this review, we focus on experimental advances in thermal characterization and phonon engineering that have drastically increased the understanding of heat transport and demonstrated efficient ways to control heat propagation in nanomaterials. We summarize the latest device-relevant methodologies of phonon engineering in semiconductor nanostructures and 2D materials, including graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides. Then, we review recent advances in thermal characterization techniques, and discuss their main challenges and limitations.

Thermal Transport Evolution Due to Nanostructural Transformations in Ga-Doped Indium-Tin-Oxide Thin Films

“…Thereby, for all calculated structures the porosity was constant and fixed to 30% to facilitate the theoretical analysis and rather to focus on the understanding how changes in phonon dispersion and scattering mechanisms affect the thermal transport at various Ga concentrations. It is worth noting that higher porosity means lower thermal conductivity, thus providing another way for phonon engineering [ 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 ] and tuning the thermoelectric performance of indium oxide-based material.…”

The heat equation for nanoconstrictions in 2D materials with Joule self-heating

“…There is huge interest in the thermal properties of twodimensional (2D) materials, motivated by applications to thermal management [1][2][3][4], interconnects in integrated circuits [5][6][7], thermoelectric devices [8][9][10][11] and nanoscale fabrication [12][13][14][15]. While nanoscale constrictions are of great importance for their electrical transport characteristics, particularly in the quantum regime [16,17], they also promote enhanced Joule self-heating and thermoelectric coefficients [18][19][20][21].…”

“…While nanoscale constrictions are of great importance for their electrical transport characteristics, particularly in the quantum regime [16,17], they also promote enhanced Joule self-heating and thermoelectric coefficients [18][19][20][21]. For such structures, scanning thermal microscopy [4] is an ideal tool to map surface temperatures with spatial resolution of a few nanometres, as applied to carbon nanotubes [22], nanowires [23][24][25][26] and 2D materials [20,21,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37].…”

“…We consider three geometries as typical examples, figure 1, which are a rectangle, a nanowire [18,19,[23][24][25][26][49][50][51] of constant width w, and a bow tie (or wedge) constriction [20,21,[51][52][53] of varying width down to a minimum w. We compare the temperature profiles for devices with the same macroscopic dimensions and characteristic parameters, for either a fixed applied potential difference or a fixed current. The nanowire and bow tie are excellent representative examples because they exhibit markedly different behaviour: the electrical resistances of the nanowire and bow tie have different dependences on the width w, and this means that Joule heating is independent of w for the nanowire (for small w and (4). Light grey indicates two leads at temperature T 0 with boundary condition (5), dark grey indicates insulating regions with boundary condition (6).…”

Personal Thermal Management by Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Functionalized Polyester Fabrics

“…Wearable devices, with various functions as health care, as personal thermal management (PTM), had become ubiquitous in daily life [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Certainly, light, comfortable and energy-efficient PTM devices are emerging and rapidly integrated into human lives.…”