Thermal Conduction Calculation of Nanowire by Non-equilibrium Green's Function

Abstract

Understanding of the thermal transport properties of nanowires is essential for the development of nanometer-scale electronic devices. We compute the thermal transport properties of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) using the non-equilibrium Green's function technique with the interatomic potentials by Tersoff and Brenner to calculate the thermal conductance. This approach is suitable for the calculations of ballistic thermal conductance of nanowires, taking the effects of shapes of nanowires into account. We study the dependence of thermal conductance on the temperature, diameter, and shapes of nanowires and clarify their features. We find that thermal conductance of CNTs agrees very well with experiments. On the other hand, we need to include defects for the thermal conductance of SiNWs.