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Carbon materials display intriguing physical properties, including superconductivity and highly anisotropic thermal conductivity found in graphene. Compressive strain can induce structural and bonding transitions in carbon materials and create new carbon phases, but their interplay with thermal conductivity remains largely unexplored. We investigated the in situ high-pressure thermal conductivity of compressed graphitic phases using picosecond transient thermoreflectance and first-principles calculations. Our results show an anomalous thermal conductivity that peaks to 260  W/mK at 15–20 GPa but drops to 3.0  W/mK at ∼35  GPa. Together with complimentary in situ Raman and x-ray diffraction results, the abnormal thermal conductivity trend of compressed carbon is attributed to phonon-mediated conductivity influenced by interlayer buckling and 𝑠⁢𝑝2 to 𝑠⁢𝑝3 transition and, subsequently, the formation of 𝑀-carbon nanocrystals and amorphous carbon. Strain-induced structural and bonding variations provide a wide-range manipulation of thermal and mechanical properties in carbon materials. 

Utilizing metal nanoparticles (NPs) in Additive Manufacturing (AM) enables fabricating parts with submicrometer resolution. The thermal properties of metal NPs are drastically different from their bulk and micronsize counterparts due to nanoscale thermal transport effects, e.g. ballistic phonon/electron transport instead of diffusive transport described by Fourier’s Law. Rough estimation of metal NPs’ thermal properties with bulk values will inevitably cause large errors for AM applications, because thermal properties evolve along with the sintering process. In this study, thermal properties of 100 nm Cu NPs are examined at different sintering stages. Effective density is measured between 3500 and 5300 kg/m 3 at a sintering temperature range of 100 and 400 °C, and the sintering of Cu NPs is determined to be around 300 °C using Thermogravimetry analysis (TGA) with Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC). A picosecond Transient Thermoreflectance (ps-TTR) technique is employed to measure the effective thermal conductivity of Cu NPs, which jumps from 18.5 ± 0.8 W/m ∙K to 26.8 ± 2.1 W/m ⋅K onset of sintering around 300 °C. These values are less than 1/10 of the bulk value (398 W/m ⋅K). The effective thermal conductivity is almost independent on porosity except in the temperature range close to 300 °C, which comes from two factors related with nanoscale thermal transport: (i) ballistic electron transport is important in particles with size comparable with electron mean free path; (ii) effective thermal conductivity is dominated by interface scattering on particles surfaces. Our results provide insights about the importance on accurate characterization of thermal properties in metal nanoparticles due to the nanoscale phenomena. 

As a branch of laser powder bed fusion, selective laser sintering (SLS) with femtosecond (fs) lasers and metal nanoparticles (NPs) can achieve high precision and dense submicron features with reduced residual stress, due to the extremely short pulse duration. Successful sintering of metal NPs with fs laser is challenging due to the ablation caused by hot electron effects. In this study, a double-pulse sintering strategy with a pair of time- delayed fs-laser pulses is proposed for controlling the electron temperature while still maintaining a high enough lattice temperature. We demonstrate that when delay time is slightly longer than the electron-phonon coupling time of Cu NPs, the ablation area was drastically reduced and the power window for successful sintering was extended by about two times. Simultaneously, the heat-affected zone can be reduced by 66% (area). This new strategy can be adopted for all the SLS processes with fs laser and unlock the power of SLS with fs lasers for future applications. 

Boron arsenide (BAs) is a covalent semiconductor with a theoretical intrinsic thermal conductivity approaching 1300 W/m K. The existence of defects not only limits the thermal conductivity of BAs significantly but also changes its pressure-dependent thermal transport behavior. Using both picosecond transient thermoreflectance and femtosecond time-domain thermoreflectance techniques, we observed a non-monotonic dependence of thermal conductivity on pressure. This trend is not caused by the pressure-modulated phonon–phonon scattering, which was predicted to only change the thermal conductivity by 10%–20%, but a result of several competing effects, including defect–phonon scattering and modification of structural defects under high pressure. Our findings reveal the complexity of the defect-modulated thermal behavior under pressure.