Suppression of Thin-Film Thermal Conductivity due to Surface Roughness

TL;DR

This paper investigates how surface roughness in ultrathin silicon films drastically reduces thermal conductivity by affecting phonon group velocity and relaxation times, revealing mechanisms beyond traditional boundary-scattering models.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed atomistic analysis of surface roughness effects on phonon transport, highlighting mechanisms not accounted for in existing boundary-scattering theories.

Findings

Surface roughness reduces phonon group velocity via hybridization with surface modes.

Surface roughness decreases relaxation time through modulation of anharmonic force constants.

Traditional boundary-scattering models overestimate thermal conductivity by up to 100% for rough ultrathin films.

Abstract

Understanding thermal transport in silicon nanostructures is crucial for effective thermal management in semiconductor devices. In such nanostructures, boundary scattering can significantly reduce thermal conductivity. Diffusive boundary scattering explains the experimentally observed thickness dependence of thermal conductivity in thin films with thicknesses of tens of nanometers; however, introducing surface roughness further reduces the thermal conductivity, which falls far below the theoretical lower limit. In this study, we calculated the thermal conductivity and phonon transport properties of rough thin films with thicknesses of up to 25 nm using anharmonic lattice dynamics and investigated the mechanisms underlying the suppression of thermal conductivity arising from surface roughness. We found that in ultrathin films with rough surfaces, thermal conductivity was suppressed by a reduction in group velocity caused by hybridization with surface-localized modes, as well as a reduction in relaxation time due to the modulation of the anharmonic interatomic force constants of surface atoms. The reduction in group velocity significantly suppressed thermal conductivity across a wide range of thicknesses and surface-roughness values. In contrast, the reduction in relaxation time exhibited strong thickness dependence. Thus, this relaxation-time reduction should be considered in ultrathin films with roughness of approximately 0.1 nm and thicknesses below 5 nm. These thermal-conductivity suppression mechanisms due to surface roughness were not considered in the boundary-scattering model, resulting in an overestimation of the thermal conductivity of the roughened thin films by up to approximately 100%.