Thermal Transport in Silicon-Germanium Superlattices at Low Temperatures

Abstract

Interfacial thermal resistances between heterogeneous materials are still a challengeable subject since the mechanism to explain it quantitatively is not clear in spite of its importance. We propose a Monte Carlo (MC) model to study phonon interfacial elastic and inelastic scattering behaviors for superlattices composed of Si and Ge materials, which substantially reduces the amount of computations. In particular, below Debye temperatures, the molecular dynamics (MD) solution is not precise enough for semiconductors because of quantization errors. In this work, thermal conductivities and thermal rectifications of Si/Ge and Ge/Si superlattices with different periods are investigated separately at temperatures below 200 K.