Probing thermal transport across amorphous region embedded in a single crystalline silicon nanowire

Abstract

While numerous studies have been carried out to characterize heat transport behaviours in various crystalline silicon nanostructures, the corresponding characteristics of amorphous one-dimension system have not been well understood. In this study, we amorphize crystalline silicon by means of helium-ion irradiation, enabling the formation of a completely amorphous region of well-defined length along a single silicon nanowire. Heat conduction across both amorphous region and its crystalline/amorphous interface is characterized by an electron beam heating technique with high measurement spatial resolution. The measured thermal conductivity of the amorphous silicon nanowire appears length-independence with length ranging from ~30 nm to few hundreds nm, revealing the fully diffusons governed heat conduction. Moreover, unlike the size-dependent interfacial thermal conductance at the interface between two one-dimensional crystalline materials, here for the first time, we observe that the interface thermal conductance across the amorphous/crystalline silicon interface is nearly independent of the length of the amorphous region. This unusual independence is further supported by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation in our work. Our results provide experimental and theoretical insight into the nature of interaction between heat carriers in crystalline and amorphous nano-structures and shed new light to design innovative silicon nanowire based devices. © 2020, The Author(s).