2017/03/27 by Andrij Vasylenko, Jamie Wynn, Paulo V. C. Medeiros +3 · 1 citation
Materials Science · #Carbon Nanotubes in Composites #Graphene research and applications #Thermal properties of materials
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.95.121408
openalex publication_date 2017/03/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The electrical conductivity of metallic carbon nanotubes (CNTs) quickly saturates with respect to bias voltage due to scattering from a large population of optical phonons. The decay of these dominant scatterers in pristine CNTs is too slow to offset an increased generation rate at high voltage bias. We demonstrate from first principles that encapsulation of one-dimensional atomic chains within a single-walled CNT can enhance the decay of ``hot'' phonons by providing additional channels for thermalization. Pacification of the phonon population growth reduces the electrical resistivity of metallic CNTs by 51% for an example system with encapsulated beryllium.