Ballistic phonon mediated detection of elementary particles in silicon

Ballistic phonon transport in holey silicon.

When the size of semiconductors is smaller than the phonon mean free path, phonons can carry heat with no internal scattering. Ballistic phonon transport has received attention for both theoretical and practical aspects because Fourier's law of heat conduction breaks down and the heat dissipation in nanoscale transistors becomes unpredictable in the ballistic regime. While recent experiments de...

Phonon-assisted ballistic to diffusive crossover in silicon nanowire transistors

As transistors get smaller, the simulations require full quantum-mechanical treatments. Most such approaches have treated the transport as ballistic, ignoring the scattering that is known to occur in such devices. We present the results of a three-dimensional, self-consistent quantum simulation of a silicon nanowire transistor. In these simulations we have included phonon scattering through a r...

Ballistic Phonon Penetration Depth in Amorphous Silicon Dioxide.

Thermal transport in amorphous silicon dioxide (a-SiO2) is traditionally treated as random walks of vibrations owing to its greatly disordered structure, which results in a mean free path (MFP) approximately the same as the interatomic distance. However, this picture has been debated constantly and in view of the ubiquitous existence of thin a-SiO2 layers in nanoelectronic devices, it is impera...

Ballistic phonon transport in ultra-thin silicon layers: Effects of confinement and orientation

We investigate the effect of confinement and orientation on the phonon transport properties of ultrathin silicon layers of thicknesses between 1 nm and 16 nm. We employ the modified valence force field method to model the lattice dynamics and the ballistic Landauer transport formalism to calculate the thermal conductance. We consider the major thin layer surface orientations {100}, {110}, {111}...

Ballistic phonon propagation in BCS superconductors