21st Century Nanoscience – A Handbook. Nanophysics Sourcebook (Volume One)

This up-to-date reference is the most comprehensive summary of the field of nanoscience and its applications. It begins with fundamental properties at the nanoscale and then goes well beyond into the practical aspects of the design, synthesis, and use of nanomaterials in various industries. It emphasizes the vast strides made in the field over the past decade – the chapters focus on new, promising directions as well as emerging theoretical and experimental methods. The contents incorporate experimental data and graphs where appropriate, as well as supporting tables and figures with a tutorial approach.

Chapter  11: Thermal Transport and Phonon Coherence in Phononic Nanostructures

With Juan Sebastian Reparaz, Markus R. Wagner

In the last century, a large diversity of research fields emerged targeting the fundamental and applied properties of the collective vibrations of lattice atoms of materials (phonons). Many works were driven by the discovery of inelastic light scattering as theoretically predicted by Brillouin and experimentally shown by Raman in the 1920s. After these discoveries, many works focused on unraveling the detailed structure of the vibrational spectrum of materials. As phonons are the main heat carriers in most nonmetallic materials, the study of the phononic properties of materials is closely linked to the study of the thermal properties and the propagation of heat.

Although heat transport has been investigated for centuries, it is only with the advent of nanotechnology that advanced techniques have been developed to study its properties at the nanoscale. On macroscopic length scales and at temperatures over the Debye temperature (i.e., large phonon occupation), heat transport is usually explained using Fourier’s law, Q = −k∇T, where Q is the heat flux, κ is the thermal conductivity, and T is the temperature.

However, at the nanoscale or at low temperatures (low-phonon occupation), deviations from this classic behavior occur due to the ballistic component of heat propagation, i.e., when the typical dimensions of the ρ material are comparable to the thermal phonon mean free path ∧_th, which defines the average distance that thermal phonons can travel without being scattered.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Theoretical Atto-nano Physics

• Chapter 2: The de Broglie Wave Nature of Molecules, Clusters and Nanoparticles

• Chapter 3: Electromagnetic Nanonetworks

• Chapter 4: Nanoscale Energy Transport

• Chapter 5: Coulomb Effects and Exotic Charge Transport in Nanostructured Materials

• Chapter 6: Spin-Dependent Thermoelectric Currents in Nanostructures (Tunnel Junctions, Thin Films, Small Rings and Quantum Dots)

• Chapter 7: Joule Heat Generation by Electric Current in Nanostructures

• Chapter 8: Quantum Transport Simulations of Nano-systems

• Chapter 9: Transient Quantum Transport in Nanostructures

• Chapter 10: Thermal Transport in Nanofilms

• Chapter 11: Thermal Transport and Phonon Coherence in Phononic Nanostructures

• Chapter 12: Quantum Chaotic Systems and Random Matrix Theory

• Chapter 13: Topological Constraint Theory and Rigidity of Glasses

• Chapter 14: Topological Descriptors of Carbon Nanostructures

• Chapter 15: Numerical Methods for Large-Scale Electronic State Calculation on Supercomputer

• Chapter 16: Atomistic Simulation of Disordered Nano-electronics

• Chapter 17: Ab Initio Simulations of Carboxylated Nanomaterials

• Chapter 18: Phase Behavior of Atomic and Molecular Nanosystems

• Chapter 19: Exact Solutions in the Density Functional Theory (DFT) and Time-Dependent DFT of Mesoscopic Systems

• Chapter 20: Molecular Simulation of Porous Graphene

• Chapter 21: Metallic Nanoglasses Investigated by Molecular Dynamics Simulations