Quantum mechanical prediction of four-phonon scattering rates and reduced thermal conductivity of solids
At a Glance
Section titled āAt a Glanceā| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2016-01-06 |
| Journal | Physical review. B./Physical review. B |
| Authors | Tianli Feng, Xiulin Ruan |
| Institutions | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| Citations | 336 |
Abstract
Section titled āAbstractāRecently, first principle-based prediction of lattice thermal conductivity\n$\kappa$ from the perturbation theory has achieved significant success.\nHowever, it only includes three-phonon scattering due to the assumption that\nfour-phonon and higher-order processes are generally unimportant. Also,\ndirectly evaluating the scattering rates of four-phonon and higher-order\nprocesses has been a long-standing challenge. In this work, however, we have\ndeveloped a formalism to explicitly determine quantum mechanical scattering\nprobability matrices for four-phonon scattering in the full Brillouin Zone, and\nby mitigating the computational challenge we have directly calculated\nfour-phonon scattering rates. We find that four-phonon scattering rates are\ncomparable to three-phonon scattering rates at medium and high temperatures,\nand they increase quadratically with temperature. As a consequence, $\kappa$ of\nLennard-Jones argon is reduced by more than 60% at 80 K when four-phonon\nscattering is included. Also, in less anharmonic materials ā diamond, silicon,\nand germanium, $\kappa$ is still reduced considerably at high temperature by\nfour-phonon scattering. Also, the thermal conductivity of optical phonons is\ndominated by the fourth and higher orders phonon scattering even at low\ntemperature.\n
Tech Support
Section titled āTech SupportāOriginal Source
Section titled āOriginal SourceāReferences
Section titled āReferencesā- 1990 - The Physics of Phonons