Tuesday, April 24, 2012

1204.4735 (Jeremy A. Johnson et al.)

Direct Measurement of Room Temperature Non-diffusive Thermal Transport
Over Micron Distances in a Silicon Membrane
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Jeremy A. Johnson, A. A. Maznev, John Cuffe, Jeffrey K. Eliason, Austin J. Minnich, Timothy Kehoe, Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres, Gang Chen, Keith A. Nelson
The "textbook" phonon mean free path (MFP) of heat carrying phonons in silicon at room temperature is ~40 nm. However, a large contribution to the thermal conductivity comes from low-frequency phonons with much longer MFPs. We present a simple experiment demonstrating that room temperature thermal transport in Si significantly deviates from the diffusion model already at micron distances. Absorption of crossed laser pulses in a freestanding silicon membrane sets up a sinusoidal temperature profile that is monitored via diffraction of a probe laser beam. By changing the period of the thermal grating we vary the heat transport distance within the range ~1-10 {\mu}m. At small distances, we observe a reduction in the effective thermal conductivity indicating a transition from the diffusive to the ballistic transport regime for the low-frequency part of the phonon spectrum.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4735

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