Transient Energy and Heat Transport in Metals: Effect of the Discrete Character of the Lattice

TL;DR

This paper uses Shastry's formalism to analyze energy and heat transport in metals, revealing new phenomena like damped oscillations due to lattice discreteness and detailing the transition from nonthermal to thermal regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model incorporating lattice discreteness to better understand transient energy transport phenomena in metals.

Findings

Identification of damped oscillations in energy transport

Observation of transition from nonthermal to thermal regimes

Quantification of energy transfer modes

Abstract

A recently developed Shastry's formalism for energy transport is used to analyze the temporal and spatial behaviors of the energy and heat transport in metals under delta function excitation at the surface. Comparison with Cattaneo's model is performed. Both models show the transition between nonthermal (ballistic) and thermal (ballistic-diffusive) regimes. Furthermore, because the new model considers the discrete character of the lattice, it highlights some new phenomena such as damped oscillations in the energy transport both in time and space. The energy relaxation of the conduction band electrons in metals is considered to be governed by the electron-phonon scattering, and the scattering time is taken to be averaged over the Fermi surface. Using the new formalism, one can quantify the transfer from nonthermal modes to thermal ones as energy propagates in the material and it is transformed into heat. While the thermal contribution shows a wave-front and an almost exponentially decaying behavior with time, the nonthermal part shows a wave-front and a damped oscillating behavior. Two superimposed oscillations are identified; a fast oscillation that is attributed to the nonthermal nature of energy transport at very short time scales and a slow oscillation that describes the nature of the transition from the nonthermal regime to the thermal regime of energy transport.