Effects of alloying on in-plane thermal conductivity and thermal boundary conductance in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers
Phys. Rev. Materials 4, 124006 – Published 29 December, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.4.124006
Abstract
Two-dimensional 1H transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) provide a platform, analogous to group IV cubic semiconductor alloys (), that enables systematic investigations on the effects of alloying in 2D material systems. The existing literature on TMD alloys explores their electrical, magnetic, and optical properties, but lacks a comprehensive analysis of thermal transport in supported and nanostructured systems. Here we employ first-principles-driven phonon Boltzmann transport formalism and a 2D-3D thermal boundary conductance model to systematically study in-plane and cross-plane phonon transport of suspended and supported single-layer TMD alloys. We find that the thermal conductivity of alloyed TMDs is dependent on system size up to tens of microns and that the combination of mass-difference and substrate scattering can significantly reduce thermal transport even in large systems ( nm). Beyond in-plane transport, we find that the thermal boundary conductance displays a qualitatively different trend and significantly weaker modulation with alloy composition as compared to the thermal conductivity. Our results help shed light on the in-plane and cross-plane thermal transport properties of 2D single-layer TMD alloys and further their applications in nanoelectronics, sensing, and energy devices.