Long Phonon Mean Free Paths Observed in Cross-plane Thermal-Conductivity Measurements of Exfoliated Hexagonal Boron Nitride

Abstract

Sub-micron-thick layers of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) exhibit high in-plane thermal conductivity and useful optical properties, and serve as dielectric encapsulation layers with low electrostatic inhomogeneity for graphene devices. Despite the promising applications of hBN as a heat spreader, the cross-plane phonon mean free paths in hBN have not been measured. We measure the cross-plane thermal conductivity of hBN flakes exfoliated from bulk crystals. We find that the thermal conductivity is extremely sensitive to film thickness. We measure a forty-fold increase in the cross-plane thermal conductivity between 7 nm and 585 nm flakes at 285 • K. We attribute the large increase in thermal conductivity with increasing thickness to contributions from phonons with long mean free paths (MFPs), spanning many hundreds of nanometers in the thickest flakes. When planar twist interfaces are introduced into the crystal by mechanically stacking multiple thin flakes, the cross-plane thermal conductivity of the stack is found to be a factor of seven below that of individual flakes with similar total thickness, thus providing strong evidence that phonon scattering at twist boundaries limits the maximum phonon MFPs. These results improve our understanding of thermal transport in two-dimensional materials and have important implications for hBN integration in nanoelectronics.

Non‐Linear Optics at Twist Interfaces in h‐BN/SiC Heterostructures

“…[53] Recently, Jaffe et al, investigated grain boundary effect in the lowering of thermal conductivity as they introduced the twisted sheets of BN with different thicknesses and random twist angles. [55] They found the low cross-plane thermal conductivity of ≈0.26 ± 0.01 Wm −1 K −1 for a ≈74 nm film by stacking the five twisted h-BN layers, which is approximately seven times lower than the calculated thermal conductivity value of ≈2.0 Wm −1 K −1 . They attributed this lowering of cross-plane thermal conductivity to the twisted interfaces originating from the grain boundary effects.…”

A Simple Numerical Method for Evaluating Heat Dissipation from Curved Wires with Periodic Applied Heating

“…1 kHz for thermal transport in the cross-plane direction of bulk hexagonal boron nitride would have λ ∼21µm. 20 In Fig. 2 (b) and (c) we see that the point source superposition method correctly predicts that the temperature near an infinite line source is proportional to λ /r, despite the fact that the point source solution given in equation ( 1) is not.…”