No Arabic abstract
Strain engineering is critical to the performance enhancement of electronic and thermoelectric devices because of its influence on the material thermal conductivity. However, current experiments cannot probe the detailed physics of the phonon-strain interaction due to the complex, inhomogeneous, and long-distance features of the strain field in real materials. Dislocations provide us with an excellent model to investigate these inhomogeneous strain fields. In this study, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations were used to study the lattice thermal conductivity of PbTe under different strain status tuned by dislocation densities. The extended 1D McKelvey-Shockley flux method was used to analyze the frequency dependence of phonon scattering in the inhomogeneously strained regions of dislocations. A spatially resolved phonon dislocation scattering process was shown, where the unequal strain in different regions affected the magnitude and frequency-dependence of the scattering rate. Our study not only advances the knowledge of strain scattering of phonon propagation but offers fundamental guidance on optimizing thermal management by structure design.
Despite the long history of dislocation-phonon interaction studies, there are many problems that have not been fully resolved during this development. These include an incompatibility between a perturbative approach and the long-range nature of a dislocation, the relation between static and dynamic scattering, and the nature of dislocation-phonon resonance. Here by introducing a fully quantized dislocation field, the dislon[1], a phonon is renormalized as a quasi-phonon, with shifted quasi-phonon energy, and accompanied by a finite quasi-phonon lifetime that is reducible to classical results. A series of outstanding legacy issues including those above can be directly explained within this unified phonon renormalization approach. In particular, a renormalized phonon naturally resolves the decades-long debate between dynamic and static dislocation-phonon scattering approaches.
Understanding the mechanisms of thermal conduction in graphene is a long-lasting research topic, due to its high thermal conductivity. Peierls-Boltzmann transport equation (PBTE) based studies have revealed many unique phonon transport properties in graphene, but most previous works only considered three-phonon scatterings and relied on interatomic force constants (IFCs) extracted at 0 K. In this paper, we explore the roles of four-phonon scatterings and the temperature dependent IFCs on phonon transport in graphene through our PBTE calculations. We demonstrate that the strength of four-phonon scatterings would be severely overestimated by using the IFCs extracted at 0 K compared with those corresponding to a finite temperature, and four-phonon scatterings are found to significantly reduce the thermal conductivity of graphene even at room temperature. In order to reproduce the prediction from molecular dynamics simulations, phonon frequency broadening has to be taken into account when determining the phonon scattering rates. Our study elucidates the phonon transport properties of graphene at finite temperatures, and could be extended to other crystalline materials.
The critical dynamics of dislocation avalanches in plastic flow is examined using a phase field crystal (PFC) model. In the model, dislocations are naturally created, without any textit{ad hoc} creation rules, by applying a shearing force to the perfectly periodic ground state. These dislocations diffuse, interact and annihilate with one another, forming avalanche events. By data collapsing the event energy probability density function for different shearing rates, a connection to interface depinning dynamics is confirmed. The relevant critical exponents agree with mean field theory predictions.
Thermal management is extremely important for designing high-performance devices. The lattice thermal conductivity of materials is strongly dependent on the structural defects at different length scales, particularly point defects like vacancies, line defects like dislocations, and planar defects such as grain boundaries. Traditionally, the McKelvey-Shockley phonon Boltzmanns transport equation (BTE) method combined with molecular dynamics simulations has been widely used to evaluate the phonon mean free paths (MFPs) in defective systems. However, this method can only provide the aggregate MFPs of the whole sample. It is, therefore, challenging to extract the MFPs in the different regions with different thermal properties. In this study, the 1D McKelvey-Shockley phonon BTE method was extended to model inhomogeneous materials, where the effect of defects on the phonon MFPs is explicitly obtained. Then, the method was used to study the phonon interactions with the core structure of an edge dislocation. The phonon MFPs in the dislocation core were obtained and consistent with the analytical model such that high frequency phonons are likely to be scattered in this area. This method not only advances the knowledge of phonon-dislocation scattering but also shows the potential to investigate phonon transport behaviors in more complicated materials.
We report on the temperature dependence of the mobility, $mu$, of the two-dimensional electron gas in a variable density AlGaN/GaN field effect transistor, with carrier densities ranging from 0.4$times10^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$ to 3.0$times10^{12}$ cm$^{-2}$ and a peak mobility of 80,000 cm$^{2}$/Vs. Between 20 K and 50 K we observe a linear dependence $mu_{ac}^{-1} = alpha$T indicating that acoustic phonon scattering dominates the temperature dependence of the mobility, with $alpha$ being a monotonically increasing function of decreasing 2D electron density. This behavior is contrary to predictions of scattering in a degenerate electron gas, but consistent with calculations which account for thermal broadening and the temperature dependence of the electron screening. Our data imply a deformation potential D = 12-15 eV.