Simulation of dimensionality effects in thermal transport

TL;DR

This paper reviews how atomistic simulations, especially lattice and molecular dynamics, help understand heat transport in low-dimensional nanostructures like nanotubes, graphene, and nanowires, highlighting the effects of reduced dimensionality on phononic properties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of atomistic simulation techniques applied to nanoscale thermal transport, emphasizing the role of dimensionality in phononic behavior of nanostructures.

Findings

Dimensionality significantly influences phonon transport properties.

Atomistic simulations bridge experimental challenges and theoretical models.

Distinct behaviors observed in carbon nanotubes, graphene, and silicon nanowires.

Abstract

The discovery of nanostructures and the development of growth and fabrication techniques of one- and two-dimensional materials provide the possibility to probe experimentally heat transport in low-dimensional systems. Nevertheless measuring the thermal conductivity of these systems is extremely challenging and subject to large uncertainties, thus hindering the chance for a direct comparison between experiments and statistical physics models. Atomistic simulations of realistic nanostructures provide the ideal bridge between abstract models and experiments. After briefly introducing the state of the art of heat transport measurement in nanostructures, and numerical techniques to simulate realistic systems at atomistic level, we review the contribution of lattice dynamics and molecular dynamics simulation to understanding nanoscale thermal transport in systems with reduced dimensionality. We focus on the effect of dimensionality in determining the phononic properties of carbon and semiconducting nanostructures, specifically considering the cases of carbon nanotubes, graphene and of silicon nanowires and ultra-thin membranes, underlying analogies and differences with abstract lattice models.