Theory and simulation of phonon transport at the nanoscale (NN16)

The project:

Heat transport in nanostructures, whose feature sizes can vary from a few up to 100s of nanometers, exhibit distinctly different behavior compared to heat transport in bulk materials. There is large on-going effort to explore this unusual behavior in order to control heat flow for heat management applications, thermoelectric energy harvesting applications, sensors, thermal diodes, thermal cloaking, thermal insulation, etc., with envisioned efficiencies that could exceed those of conventional bulk materials. This new emerging field is referred to us ‘phononics’, attributed to phonons, the fundamental elements of heat transfer. The goal of this PhD project is to understand phonon transport in nanostructured and low-dimensional materials by exploring both their particle and wave nature through theory and (large-scale) simulations. A variety of theoretical models and simulation approaches will be developed and used to describe phonon transport, spanning from employing the simplified Callaway model, to the particle based Monte Carlo approach, and to the wave based Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function approach. Each model explores a different phonon transport regime and different phenomena. The unified phonon transport computational framework that will developed during the project will provide understanding to a large variety of open problems related to nanoscale heat transfer.