2024/05/03 by Yujie Quan, Quan, Yujie, Bolin Liao +1 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · #Advancements in Semiconductor Devices and Circuit Design #FOS: Physical sciences #Machine Learning in Materials Science #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Thermal properties of materials
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.02257
openalex publication_date 2024/05/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Two-dimensional (2D) materials have shown great potential in applications as transistors, where thermal dissipation becomes crucial because of the increasing energy density. Although thermal conductivity of 2D materials has been extensively studied, interactions between nonequilibrium electrons and phonons, which can be strong when high electric fields and heat current coexist, are not considered. In this work, we systematically study the electron drag effect, where nonequilibrium electrons impart momenta to phonons and influence the thermal conductivity, in 2D semiconductors using ab initio simulations. We find that, at room temperature, electron drag can significantly increase thermal conductivity by decreasing phonon-electron scattering in 2D semiconductors, while its impact in three-dimensional (3D) semiconductors is negligible. We attribute this difference to the large electron-phonon scattering phase space and higher contribution to thermal conductivity by drag-active phonons. Our work elucidates the fundamental physics underlying coupled electron-phonon transport in materials of various dimensionalities.