Heat flow in InAs/InP heterostructure nanowires

TL;DR

This study combines experimental measurements and modeling to investigate heat transfer via electron-phonon interactions in InAs/InP nanowires, revealing strong coupling at low temperatures and questioning traditional power-law models.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data and analysis on electron-phonon heat flow in nanowires, challenging existing theoretical models and assumptions.

Findings

Electron and phonon temperatures are highly coupled at 2 K.

The usual power-law model may not accurately describe e-ph coupling in nanowires.

Observed e-ph coupling strength exceeds theoretical predictions.

Abstract

The transfer of heat between electrons and phonons plays a key role for thermal management in future nanowire-based devices, but only a few experimental measurements of electron-phonon (e-ph) coupling in nanowires are available. Here, we combine experimental temperature measurements on an InAs/InP heterostructure nanowire system with finite element modeling (FEM) to extract information on heat flow mediated by e-ph coupling. We find that the electron and phonon temperatures in our system are highly coupled even at temperatures as low as 2 K. Additionally, we find evidence that the usual power-law temperature dependence of electron-phonon coupling may not correctly describe the coupling in nanowires and show that this result is consistent with previous research on similar one-dimensional electron systems. We also compare the strength of the observed e-ph coupling to a theoretical analysis of e-ph interaction in InAs nanowires, which predicts a significantly weaker coupling strength than observed experimentally.