Unusual high thermal conductivity in boron arsenide bulk crystals

We report experimental evidence that departs from these long-held criteria. We measured a local room-temperature thermal conductivity exceeding 1000 watts per meter-kelvin and an average bulk value reaching 900 watts per meter-kelvin in bulk boron arsenide (BAs) crystals, where boron and arsenic are light and heavy elements, respectively. The high values are consistent with a proposal for phonon-band engineering and can only be explained by higher-order phonon processes. These findings yield insight into the physics of heat conduction in solids and show BAs to be the only known semiconductor with ultrahigh thermal conductivity.

Source: ScienceNOW - August 9, 2018 Category: Science Authors: Tian, F., Song, B., Chen, X., Ravichandran, N. K., Lv, Y., Chen, K., Sullivan, S., Kim, J., Zhou, Y., Liu, T.-H., Goni, M., Ding, Z., Sun, J., Udalamatta Gamage, G. A. G., Sun, H., Ziyaee, H., Huyan, S., Deng, L., Zhou, J., Schmidt, A. J., Chen, S., Chu, Tags: Physics reports Source Type: news