A detailed understanding of the relation between microscopic structure and phonon propagation at the nanoscale is essential to design materials with desired phononic and thermal properties. Here we uncover a new mechanism of phonon interaction in surface oxidized membranes, i.e., native oxide layers interact with phonons in ultra-thin silicon membranes through local resonances. The local resonances reduce the low frequency phonon group velocities and shorten their mean free path. This effect opens up a new strategy for ultralow thermal conductivity design as it complements the scattering mechanism which scatters higher frequency modes effectively. The combination of native oxide layer and alloying with germanium in concentration as small as 5% reduces the thermal conductivity of silicon membranes to 100 time lower than the bulk. In addition, the resonance mechanism produced by native oxide surface layers is particularly effective for thermal condutivity reduction even at very low temperatures, at which only low frequency modes are populated.Controlling terahertz vibrations and heat transport in nanostructures has a broad impact on several applications, such as thermal management in micro-and nano-electronics, renewable energies harvesting, sensing, biomedical imaging and information and communication technologies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Significant efforts have been made to understand and engineer heat transport in nanoscale silicon due to its natural abundance and technological relevance [9][10][11][12]. In the past decade researchers explored strategies to obtain silicon based materials with low thermal conductivity (TC) and unaltered electronic transport coefficients, so to achieve high thermoelectric figure of merit and enable silicon-based thermoelectric technology [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].From the earlier studies it was recognized that lowdimensional silicon nanostructures, such as nanowires, thin films and nano membranes feature a largely reduced TC, up to 50 times lower than that of bulk at room temperature. TC reduction becomes more prominent with the reduction of the characteristic dimension of the nanostructures [19][20][21][22]. Theory and experiments consistently show that surface disorder and the presence of disordered material at surfaces play a major role in determining the TC of nanostructures [12,[23][24][25]. However, a comprehensive understanding of the physical mechanisms underlying so large TC reduction is lacking. The effect of surface roughness and surface disorder on phonons has been so far interpreted in terms of phonon scattering [26][27][28][29][30], but scattering would not account for mean free path reduction of long-wavelength low-frequency modes. Recent theoretical work demonstrated that surface nanostructures, such as nanopillars at the surface of thin films or nanowires, can efficiently reduce TC through resonances, a mechanism that is intrinsically different from scattering [31,32]. Surface resonances alter directly phonon dispersion relations by hybridizing with prop...