Study of Thermal Transport Mechanisms in Low-Dimensional Materials for Next-Generation Electronics
Keywords:
Thermal transport, low-dimensional materials, phonon scattering, graphene, molybdenum disulfide, silicon nanowires, time-domain thermoreflectance, Boltzmann transport equation, nanoelectronics thermal managementAbstract
In contemporary electronics, effective thermal management has emerged as a primary design constraint due to the reduction of device sizes to the nanometre scale and the increase in power densities. In materials with low dimensions, such as graphene, transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), and semiconductor nanowires, heat is mainly transported by phonons. These phonons experience significant alterations in their transport due to boundary scattering, reduced dimensionality, and confinement effects, which do not have direct counterparts in bulk crystals. This study offers an integrated experimental and analytical examination of thermal transport in three typical low-dimensional systems: suspended monolayer graphene, few-layer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), and silicon nanowires with varying diameters. The methods employed include time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR), micro-Raman thermometry, and suspended micro-bridge resistance thermometry. The thermal conductivities measured at room temperature were 2650 ± 320 W m-1K-1 for suspended monolayer graphene, 84 ± 9 W m-1K-1 for five-layer MoS2, and 34 ± 4 W m-1K-1 for silicon nanowires with a 50 nm diameter. These values are reduced by one to two orders of magnitude compared to their bulk crystal counterparts. Measurements taken across temperatures ranging from 100 K to 400 K, along with a phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) analysis using the relaxation-time approximation, show that Umklapp scattering is predominant at high temperatures, while boundary and layer-number-dependent scattering influence the trends at low temperatures and varying sizes. The reconstruction of the cumulative thermal conductivity accumulation function indicates that phonons with mean free paths between 100 nm and 1 micrometre play a significant role in heat conduction in graphene, suggesting nanostructuring strategies for thermal management. The findings are analyzed in relation to thermal bottlenecks in transistors and interconnects based on two-dimensional materials, and guidelines for designing heat-spreading layers in future electronic packages are suggested. This research provides quantitative benchmarking data and a validated modeling framework to support the thermal-aware design of nanoelectronic devices.
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