Thermal transport in nanostructures

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in understanding thermal transport in nanostructures, highlighting unique physical phenomena, size effects, and potential applications in thermoelectrics and phononics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent studies on thermal transport in low-dimensional nanostructures, emphasizing new physics and applications.

Findings

Phonons exhibit super-diffusive transport in nanostructures.

Thermal conductivity depends on size and boundary scattering.

Fourier's law does not hold in low-dimensional systems.

Abstract

This review summarizes recent studies of thermal transport in nanoscaled semiconductors. Different from bulk materials, new physics and novel thermal properties arise in low dimensional nanostructures, such as the abnormal heat conduction, the size dependence of thermal conductivity, phonon boundary/edge scatterings. It is also demonstrated that phonons transport super-diffusively in low dimensional structures, in other words, Fourier's law is not applicable. Based on manipulating phonons, we also discuss envisioned applications of nanostructures in a broad area, ranging from thermoelectrics, heat dissipation to phononic devices.