An alternative approach to efficient simulation of micro/nanoscale phonon transport

TL;DR

This paper introduces a linearized, energy-based deviational Monte Carlo method for simulating phonon transport at micro/nanoscale, offering significant computational efficiency improvements for small deviations from equilibrium.

Contribution

It develops a simplified, decoupled particle trajectory simulation approach under linearized conditions, enhancing efficiency without extra approximations.

Findings

Achieves faster simulation of phonon transport in 3D geometries.

Maintains accuracy while reducing computational complexity.

Applicable to steady and transient problems.

Abstract

Starting from the recently proposed energy-based deviational formulation for solving the Boltzmann equation [J.-P. Peraud and N. G. Hadjiconstantinou, Phys. Rev. B 84, 2011], which provides significant computational speedup compared to standard Monte Carlo methods for small deviations from equilibrium, we show that additional computational benefits are possible in the limit that the governing equation can be linearized. The proposed method exploits the observation that under linearized conditions (small temperature differences) the trajectories of individual deviational particles can be decoupled and thus simulated independently; this leads to a particularly simple and efficient algorithm for simulating steady and transient problems in arbitrary three-dimensional geometries, without introducing any additional approximation.