Thermal properties of nanocrystalline silicon nanobeams

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nanoscale structure and surface effects influence thermal conductivity in nanocrystalline silicon nanobeams, introducing a new contactless measurement technique and revealing significant reductions in thermal transport at small grain sizes.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of thermal conductivity dependence on grain size and geometry in nanocrystalline silicon, and introduces a versatile optical method for thermal characterization.

Findings

Thermal conductivity drops to below 10 W/m·K in nanocrystalline silicon.

Reducing grain size further decreases thermal conductivity.

The new optical resonance-based technique agrees with thermoreflectance measurements.

Abstract

Controlling thermal energy transfer at the nanoscale has become critically important in many applications and thermal properties since it often limits device performance. In this work, we study the effects on thermal conductivity arising from the nanoscale structure of free-standing nanocrystalline silicon films and the increasing surface-to-volume ratio when fabricated into suspended optomechanical nanobeams. We characterize thermal transport in structures with different grain sizes and elucidate the relative impact of grain size and geometrical dimensions on thermal conductivity. We use a micro-time-domain thermoreflectance method to study the impact of the grain size distribution, from 10 to 400 nm, on the thermal conductivity in free-standing nanocrystalline silicon films considering surface phonon and grain boundary scattering. We find a drastic reduction in the thermal conductivity, down to values of 10 W.m^{-1}.K^{-1} and below, which is just a fraction of the conductivity of single crystalline silicon. Decreasing the grain size further decreases the thermal conductivity. We also observe that this effect is smaller in OM nanostructures than in membranes due to the competition of surface scattering in decreasing thermal conductivity. Finally, we introduce a novel versatile contactless characterization technique that can be adapted to any structure supporting a thermally shifted optical resonance and use it to evaluate the thermal conductivity. This method can be used with optical resonances exhibiting different mode profiles and the data is shown to agrees quantitatively with the thermoreflectance measurements. This work opens the way to a more generalized thermal characterization of optomechanical cavities and to create hot-spots with engineered shapes at desired position in the structures as a means to study thermal transport in coupled photon-phonon structures.