The University of Tokyo · Materials Science
Professor Sébastian Volz's research lab specializes in the fundamental understanding of heat transport at the nanoscale, with a focus on phonon dynamics, thermal transport in low-dimensional materials, and nanostructured composites. The lab employs advanced molecular dynamics simulations and nonequilibrium techniques to investigate thermal conductivity in silicon nanowires, graphene phononic crystals, carbon nanotube composites, and nanomembranes, aiming to uncover the role of coherent phonons, boundary scattering, and surface effects. A key research direction involves engineering thermal properties through nanoarchitecture, such as optimizing thermal contact resistance and leveraging surface phonon-polaritons for enhanced heat dissipation in next-generation microelectronics. The lab also explores the breakdown of classical Fourier heat conduction and the validity of generalized heat transport laws in nanosystems.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
We investigate the thermal conductivity of silicon nanowires based on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The simulated thermal conductivities of nanowires with square cross sections are found to be about two orders of magnitude smaller than those of bulk Si crystals in a wide range of temperatures (200–500 K) for both rigid and free boundary conditions. A solution of the Boltzmann transport equation is used to explore the possibility of explaining the MD results based on boundary scattering.
We investigate the thermal conductivity of bulk silicon crystals based on molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations. If it is taken that the system size must be larger than the phonon mean free path, several hundreds of millions of atoms must be computed for crystals with large thermal conductivity values such as Si. We demonstrate in this work that the thermal conductivity of Si crystals can be simulated by MD techniques using several thousands of atoms with periodic boundary conditions. We identify
A carbon-nanotube architecture based on ceramic microparticles allows for strikingly reducing the number of thermal contact resistances between carbon nanotubes (CNT). The result is a 130% enhancement of the thermal conductivity of the nanocomposites at a remarkably low CNT mass fraction of 0.15 wt%.
Through nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, we report the direct numerical evidence of the coherent phonons participating in thermal transport at room temperature in graphene phononic crystal (GPnC) structure and evaluate their contribution to thermal conductivity based on the two-phonon model. With decreasing period length in GPnC, the transition from the incoherent to coherent phonon transport is clearly observed. When a random perturbation to the positions of holes is introduced in
Using a molecular-dynamics (MD) numerical simulation, we test the validity of the generalized Fourier law predicted by Cattaneo and Vernotte (CV) and theoretically established in the extended irreversible thermodynamics. The numerical experiments are achieved at constant and high density in a Lennard-Jones (6-12) solid argon. The temperature domain is restricted to the so-called kinetic region where the thermal conductivity \ensuremath{\lambda}\ensuremath{\sim}${\mathit{T}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{
Improving heat dissipation in increasingly miniature microelectronic devices is a serious challenge, as the thermal conduction in nanostructures is markedly reduced by increasingly frequent scattering of phonons on the surface. However, the surface could become an additional heat dissipation channel if phonons couple with photons forming hybrid surface quasiparticles called surface phonon-polaritons (SPhPs). Here, we experimentally demonstrate the formation of SPhPs on the surface of SiN nanomem
Phase-change materials (crystalline at low temperatures and partial-crystalline partial-liquid state at high temperatures) are widely used as thermoelectric converters and battery electrodes. Here, we report the underlying mechanisms driving the thermal transport of the liquid component, and the thermal conductivity contributions from phonons, vibrations with extremely short mean free path, liquid and lattice-liquid interactions in phase-changed Li<sub>2</sub>S. In the crystalline state (T ≤ 100
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