Annual Reviews of Heat Transfer

ISSN 1049-0787

Year 2005

• 14

617 pages

Volume price - $141.00

Deyu Li
Vanderbilt University, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 333 Olin Hall, VU Station B351592, Nashville, TN 37235-1592, USA

Arun Majumdar
University of California at Berkeley, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Thermal transport in low-dimensional nanostructures is important for next-generation microelectronic cooling techniques, novel solid-state energy conversion devices, and micro-nanoscale sensors and actuators. Thermal transport caused by lattice vibrations or phonons in nanostructures is very complicated due to the comparable phonon mean-free-path, phonon wavelength, and characteristic size of nanostructures. The comparable length scales lead to novel transport phenomena that do not exist in bulk materials. Significant progress has been made both theoretically and experimentally in understanding the thermal transport in nanostructures during last decade. In this paper, we first reviewed the fundamental theory of phonon transport and the size confinement effects on phonon transport. Recent work on thermal transport in multilayers and superlattices were then summarized with emphasis on the understanding of underlying physics. The effects of acoustic mismatch, interface roughness, interface defects and dislocations, phonon mini-bandgaps, and dispersion mismatch were discussed. Finally, recent studies on thermal transport in nanowires and nanotubes were reviewed. Boundary scattering, phonon dispersion modification, and quantum confinement on phonon energy states were discussed based on available experimental results.

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