Graphene exhibits extraordinary electronic and mechanical properties, and extremely high thermal conductivity. Being a very stable atomically thick membrane that can be suspended between two leads, graphene provides a perfect test platform for studyi
ng thermal conductivity in two-dimensional systems, which is of primary importance for phonon transport in low-dimensional materials. Here we report experimental measurements and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of thermal conduction in suspended single layer graphene as a function of both temperature and sample length. Interestingly and in contrast to bulk materials, when temperature at 300K, thermal conductivity keeps increasing and remains logarithmic divergence with sample length even for sample lengths much larger than the average phonon mean free path. This result is a consequence of the two-dimensional nature of phonons in graphene and provides fundamental understanding into thermal transport in two-dimensional materials.
We report the first temperature dependent phonon transport measurements in suspended Cu-CVD single layer graphene (SLG) from 15K to 380K using microfabricated suspended devices. The thermal conductance per unit cross section $sigma$/A increases with
temperature and exhibits a peak near T~280K ($pm$10K) due to the Umklapp process. At low temperatures (T<140K), the temperature dependent thermal conductivity scales as ~T^{1.5}, suggesting that the main contribution to thermal conductance arises from flexural acoustic (ZA) phonons in suspended SLG. The $sigma$/A reaches a high value of 1.7$times10^5 T^{1.5}$ W/m^2K, which is approaching the expected ballistic phonon thermal conductance for two-dimensional graphene sheets. Our results not only clarify the ambiguity in the thermal conductance, but also demonstrate the potential of Cu-CVD graphene for heat related applications.
