Effect of surface roughness on thermal conductivity of VLS-grown rough Si_1-x Ge _x nanowires

The recent demonstration of thermal conductivity of rough electrolessly etched Si nanowire (Hochbaum et al., Nature, 451:163, 2008) attracted a lot of interest, because it could not be explained by the existing theory; thermal conductivity of rough Si nanowires falls below the boundary scattering of the thermal conductivity. However, nanoscale pores presented in the nanowires (Hochbaum et al., Nano Letters, 9:3550-3554, 2009) hinder one to be fully convinced that the surface roughness solely made a contribution to the significant reduction in thermal conductivity. In this study, we synthesized vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) grown rough Si_1-xGe_x nanowire and measured and theoretically simulated thermal conductivity of the nanowire. The thermal conductivity of rough Si_0.96Ge_0.04 nanowire is an order of magnitude lower than that of bulk Si_0.96Ge_0.04 and around a factor of four times lower than that of smooth Si _0.96Ge_0.04 nanowire. This significant reduction could be explained by the fact that the surface roughness scatters medium-wavelength phonons, whereas the long-wavelength phonons are scattered by phonon boundary scattering, and the short-wavelength phonons are scattered by alloy scattering.