Ultralow thermal conductance of the van der Waals interface between organic nanoribbons

Y. XIONG, X. YU, Y. HUANG, J. YANG, L. LI, N. YANG*, D. XU

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

33 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Understanding thermal transport through nanoscale van der Waals interfaces is vital for addressing thermal management challenges in nanoelectronic devices such as those made of assembled nanostructure arrays; however, the interfacial thermal conductance (GCA) remains poorly characterized because of technical challenges. In this work, we present an experimental approach and an interface heat transfer model to determine the GCA between two individual copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) nanoribbons. The GCA is found to be on the order of 105 Wm−2K−1 at 300 K, which is more than two orders of magnitude lower than the value predicted by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for a perfectly smooth interface between two parallelly aligned CuPc nanoribbons. Further MD simulations and contact mechanics analysis reveal that surface roughness can significantly reduce the adhesion energy and the effective contact area between CuPc nanoribbons and thus result in an ultralow GCA. In addition, the adhesion energy at the interface also depends on the stacking configuration of two CuPc nanoribbons, which also contributes to the observed ultralow GCA. This work provides a new approach for studying thermal transport through nanoscale van der Waals interfaces and discloses the critical role of nanoscale surface roughness in reducing the GCA.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100139
Number of pages8
JournalMaterials Today Physics
Volume11
Early online date30 Sept 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2019
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Funding

D.X. acknowledges the funding support from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People's Republic of China, under the General Research Fund (RGC Ref. No. 14238416). N.Y. acknowledges the funding support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51576076 and No. 51711540031), Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (Grant No. 2017CFA046), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HUST: Grant No. 2016YXZD006). J.Y. acknowledges the funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51676036). L.L. acknowledges the funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51572149). X.Y. and N.Y. acknowledge the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin (TianHe-1 (A)) and China Scientific Computing Grid (ScGrid) for providing assistance in computations. Appendix A

Keywords

  • Copper phthalocyanine nanoribbons
  • Interfacial thermal conductance
  • Nanoscale van der Waals interface
  • Stacking configuration
  • Surface roughness

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