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1. Electric field tuned anisotropic to isotropic thermal transport transition in monolayer borophene without altering its atomic structure

   https://doi.org/10.1039/d0nr03273e  

   Yang, Zhonghua; Yuan, Kunpeng; Meng, Jin; Hu, Ming (October 2020, Nanoscale)

   null (Ed.)

   Thermal anisotropy/isotropy is one of the fundamental thermal transport properties of materials and plays a critical role in a wide range of practical applications. Manipulation of anisotropic to isotropic thermal transport or vice versa is in increasing demand. However, almost all the existing approaches for tuning anisotropy or isotropy focus on structure engineering or materials processing, which is time and cost consuming and irreversible, while little progress has been made with an intact, robust, and reversible method. Motivated by the inherent relationship between interatomic interaction mediated phonon transport and electronic charges, we comprehensively investigate the effect of external electric field on thermal transport in two-dimensional (2D) borophene by performing first-principles calculations along with the phonon Boltzmann transport equation. Under external electric field, the lattice thermal conductivity of borophene in both in-plane directions first increases significantly to peak values with the maximum augmentation factor of 2.82, and the intrinsic anisotropy (the ratio of thermal conductivity along two in-plane directions) is boosted to the highest value of 2.13. After that, thermal conductivities drop down steeply and anisotropy exhibits oscillating decay. With the electric field increasing to 0.4 V Å −1 , the thermal conductivity is dramatically suppressed to 1/40 of the original value at no electric field. More interestingly, the anisotropy of the thermal conductivity decreases to the minimum value of 1.25, showing almost isotropic thermal transport. Such abnormal anisotropic to isotropic thermal transport transition stems from the large enhancement and suppression of phonon lifetime at moderate and high strength of electric field, respectively, and acts as an amplifying or reducing factor to the thermal conductivity. We further explain the tunability of phonon lifetime of the dominant acoustic mode by an electron localization function. By comparing the electric field-modulated thermal conductivity of borophene with the dielectric constant, it is found that the screened potential resulting from the redistributed charge density leads to phonon renormalization and the modulation of phonon anharmonicity and anisotropy through electric field. Our study paves the way for robust tuning of anisotropy of phonon transport in materials by applying intact, robust, and reversible external electric field without altering their atomic structure and would have a significant impact on emerging applications, such as thermal management of nanoelectronics and thermoelectric energy conversion. 

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2. Lattice thermal conductivity and phonon transport properties of monolayer fluorographene

   https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0224083  

   Han, Seungbin; Lee, Dongkyu; Lee, Sungwoo; Lee, Gun-Do; Lee, Sangyeop; Jang, Hyejin (October 2024, Journal of Applied Physics)

   Fluorographene, a fluorinated graphene-derivative, is expected to feature both high thermal conductivity and electrical insulation simultaneously, making it an emerging material for thermal management in electronic devices. In this paper, we investigated the lattice thermal conductivity and phonon transport properties of monolayer fluorographene using first-principles calculation. The solution of the fully linearized phonon Boltzmann transport equation gives the lattice thermal conductivity of monolayer fluorographene as 145.2 W m−1 K−1 at 300 K, which is about 20 times smaller than that of monolayer graphene. We systematically compared the phonon transport properties of all phonon modes in graphene and fluorographene in terms of phonon polarization. The significantly reduced thermal conductivity of fluorographene can be attributed to the lowering of both the lifetime of the flexural acoustic phonons and the group velocities of all acoustic phonons. We concluded that the broken in-plane mirror symmetry and the weaker in-plane chemical bonds induced by fluorination led to the suppression of the lattice thermal conductivity of fluorographene. Finally, we investigated the anomalously large contribution of optical phonons to the thermal transport process in fluorographene, where the large group velocities of selected optical phonons were derived from the in-plane acoustic modes of graphene. Our work provides a new approach to studying the influence of chemical functionalization on the phonon structure and exploring graphene-derived thermal management materials. 

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3. Unleashing the power of artificial intelligence in phonon thermal transport: Current challenges and prospects

   https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0201778  

   Hu, Ming (May 2024, Journal of Applied Physics)

   The discovery of advanced thermal materials with exceptional phonon properties drives technological advancements, impacting innovations from electronics to superconductors. Understanding the intricate relationship between composition, structure, and phonon thermal transport properties is crucial for speeding up such discovery. Exploring innovative materials involves navigating vast design spaces and considering chemical and structural factors on multiple scales and modalities. Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming science and engineering and poised to transform discovery and innovation. This era offers a unique opportunity to establish a new paradigm for the discovery of advanced materials by leveraging databases, simulations, and accumulated knowledge, venturing into experimental frontiers, and incorporating cutting-edge AI technologies. In this perspective, first, the general approach of density functional theory (DFT) coupled with phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) for predicting comprehensive phonon properties will be reviewed. Then, to circumvent the extremely computationally demanding DFT + BTE approach, some early studies and progress of deploying AI/machine learning (ML) models to phonon thermal transport in the context of structure–phonon property relationship prediction will be presented, and their limitations will also be discussed. Finally, a summary of current challenges and an outlook of future trends will be given. Further development of incorporating AI/ML algorithms for phonon thermal transport could range from phonon database construction to universal machine learning potential training, to inverse design of materials with target phonon properties and to extend ML models beyond traditional phonons. 

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4. Fast and accurate machine learning prediction of phonon scattering rates and lattice thermal conductivity

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-023-01020-9  

   Guo, Ziqi; Roy Chowdhury, Prabudhya; Han, Zherui; Sun, Yixuan; Feng, Dudong; Lin, Guang; Ruan, Xiulin (June 2023, npj Computational Materials)

   Abstract Lattice thermal conductivity is important for many applications, but experimental measurements or first principles calculations including three-phonon and four-phonon scattering are expensive or even unaffordable. Machine learning approaches that can achieve similar accuracy have been a long-standing open question. Despite recent progress, machine learning models using structural information as descriptors fall short of experimental or first principles accuracy. This study presents a machine learning approach that predicts phonon scattering rates and thermal conductivity with experimental and first principles accuracy. The success of our approach is enabled by mitigating computational challenges associated with the high skewness of phonon scattering rates and their complex contributions to the total thermal resistance. Transfer learning between different orders of phonon scattering can further improve the model performance. Our surrogates offer up to two orders of magnitude acceleration compared to first principles calculations and would enable large-scale thermal transport informatics. 

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5. The intrinsic thermal transport properties of the biphenylene network and the influence of hydrogenation: a first-principles study

   https://doi.org/10.1039/D1TC04154A  

   Zhang, Pei; Ouyang, Tao; Tang, Chao; He, Chaoyu; Li, Jin; Zhang, Chunxiao; Hu, Ming; Zhong, Jianxin (December 2021, Journal of Materials Chemistry C)

   Utilizing first-principles calculations combined with phonon Boltzmann transport theory up to fourth-order anharmonicity, we systematically investigate the thermal transport properties of the biphenylene network [BPN, recently synthesized experimentally by Fan et al. , Science , 2021, 372 , 852–856] and hydrogenated BPN (HBPN). The calculations show that four-phonon scattering significantly affects the lattice thermal conductivity ( κ ) of BPN. At room temperature, the κ of BPN is reduced from 582.32 (1257.07) W m −1 K −1 to 309.56 (539.88) W m −1 K −1 along the x ( y ) direction after considering the four-phonon scattering. Moreover, our results demonstrate that the thermal transport in BPN could also be greatly suppressed by hydrogenation, where the κ of HBPN along the x ( y ) direction is merely 16.62% (10.14%) of that of pristine BPN at 300 K. The mechanism causing such an obvious decrease of κ of HBPN is identified to be due to the enhanced phonon scattering rate and reduced group velocity, which is further revealed by the increased scattering phase space and weakened C–C bond. The results presented in this work shed light on the intrinsic thermal transport features of BPN and HBPN, which will help us to understand the phonon transport processes and pave the way for their future developments in the thermal field. 

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