Abstract
We investigated the thermal conductivity of individual single-crystalline PbTe nanowires grown by a chemical vapor transport method. Thermal conductivities of PbTe nanowires 182-436 nm in diameter were measured using suspended microdevices. The thermal conductivity of a PbTe nanowire appeared to decrease with decreasing nanowire diameter and was measured to be 1.29 W/mK for a 182 nm nanowire at 300 K, which is about half of that of bulk PbTe. Our results indicate that phonon transport through a PbTe nanowire is effectively suppressed by the enhanced phonon boundary scattering due to size effects.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 103101 |
| Journal | Applied Physics Letters |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2010 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by Priority Research Centers Program (Grant No. 2009-0093823), Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), by a grant from “Center for Nanostructured Materials Technology” under “21st Century Frontier R&D Programs” of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, and by Seoul R&BD Program (10816). J.P. is grateful for the financial support of a grant from the WCU (World Class University) program (R31-10035). J.W.R. thanks the financial support of the Seoul Science Fellowship. We thank Professor A. Majumdar and K. Hippalgaonkar at the University of California, Berkeley and Professor R. Chen at the University of California, San Diego for helpful discussions and assistance with thermal characterization. J.W.R. and S.Y.J. equally contributed to this work.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)