The Vacancy Effect on Thermal Interface Resistance between Aluminum and Silicon by Molecular Dynamics

TL;DR

This study investigates how nanoscale vacancies affect the thermal interface resistance between aluminum and silicon, revealing that vacancies significantly increase resistance and that vacancy type and size influence this effect.

Contribution

It introduces a molecular dynamics approach that considers phonon-phonon and electron-phonon coupling to analyze vacancy effects on thermal interface resistance.

Findings

Vacancies significantly increase thermal interface resistance.

Different vacancy types and sizes produce distinct effects.

Structural differences influence heat transfer across interfaces.

Abstract

Thermal transport across interfaces is an important issue for microelectronics, photonics, and thermoelectric devices and has been studied both experimentally and theoretically in the past. In this paper, thermal interface resistance (1/G) between aluminum and silicon with nanoscale vacancies was calculated using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD). Both phonon-phonon coupling and electron-phonon coupling are considered in calculations. The results showed that thermal interface resistance increased largely due to vacancies. The effect of both the size and the type of vacancies is studied and compared. And an obvious difference is found for structures with different type/size vacancies.