Thermal conductance of graphene/hexagonal boron nitride heterostructures

The lattice-based scattering boundary method is applied to compute the phonon mode-resolved transmission coefficients and thermal conductances of in-plane heterostructures built from graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The thermal conductance of all structures is dominated by acoustic phonon modes near the Brillouin zone center that have high group velocity, population, and transmission coefficient. Out-of-plane modes make their most significant contributions at low frequencies, whereas in-plane modes contribute across the frequency spectrum. Finite-length superlattice junctions between graphene and hBN leads have a lower thermal conductance than comparable junctions between two graphene leads due to lack of transmission in the hBN phonon bandgap. The thermal conductances of bilayer systems differ by less than 10% from their singlelayer counterparts on a per area basis, in contrast to the strong thermal conductivity reduction when moving from singleto multi-layer graphene. Published by AIP Publishing. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4978362]