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Surface charges can modify the elastic modulus of nanostructure, leading to the change of the phonon and thermal properties in semiconductor nanostructure. In this work, the influence of surface charges on the phonon properties and phonon thermal conductivity of GaN nanofilm are quantitatively investigated. In the framework of continuum mechanics, the modified elastic modulus can be derived for the nanofilm with surface charges. The elastic model is presented to analyze the phonon properties such as the phonon dispersion relation, phonon group velocity, density of states of phonons in nanofilm with the surface charges. The phonon thermal conductivity of nanofilm can be obtained by considering surface charges. The simulation results demonstrate that surface charges can significantly change the phonon properties and thermal conductivity in a GaN nanofilm. Positive surface charges reduce the phonon energy and phonon group velocity but increase the density of states of phonons. The surface charges can change the size and temperature dependence of phonon thermal conductivity of GaN nanofilm. Based on these theoretical results, one can adjust the phonon properties and temperature/size dependent thermal conductivity in GaN nanofilm by changing the surface charges.
Due to the novel properties and wide applications in electronic devices, nanostructured semiconductors have received a great deal of attention in the last decades.[1–4] As the phonon thermal conductivity is one of most important parameters of semiconductor nanostructures, it plays an essential role in investigating the semiconductor nanostructures used in electronic devices to understand the phonon and thermal properties of semiconductor nanostructure comprehensively.[1,5–7] For example, thermoelectric converters require as lower thermal conductivity as possible to improve the thermoelectric conversion efficiency, while nanoelectronic devices require as much higher thermal conductivity as possible for efficient heat dissipation.[8–12] Therefore, the phonon and thermal properties of semiconductor nanostructures have aroused the great interest in the precise design and application of electronic devices.
So far, a lot of researches have focused on the spatially-confined phonon properties in semiconductor nanostructure such as the phonon dispersion relation, phonon group velocity and the phonon density of state, as well as the relationship between the phonon thermal conductivity and the phonon properties.[1,13–16] For example, Majumda[17] proposed that the heat transfer induced by lattice vibration or phonon transport in a dielectric film can be treated as a radiation heat transfer on a microscopic scale, and the phonon thermal transfer in the nanofilm satisfies the blackbody radiation law. Balandin et al.[1,13] proposed the phonon engineering and used the elastic model to characterize the phonon properties in semiconductor nanostructures for controlling the thermal and electric properties in these nanostructures. Besides the elastic continuous model and Boltzmann transport approach,[5,16,18–21] first-principles and molecular dynamics simulations have also been used to analyze the lattice thermal conductivity of semiconductor nanostructures.[22–26]
The surface/interface effects can also play a significant role in investigating the phonon and thermal properties of semiconductor nanostructures, such as the surface/interface phonon scattering effects and surface/interface stress effects.[18,19,21,27–29] For example, Chen[18] used the Boltzmann transport equation to establish the phonon transport model for the superlattice films by considering different phonon interface scattering modes, and the thermal conductivity of the superlattice films was obtained by numerical calculation. Zhu et al.[19,21,28,29] used the elastic model and the Boltzmann transport approach to explore the influences of surface stress and surface phonon scattering on the phonon properties and phonon thermal conductivity in GaN nanofilms.
The nanostructured components of semiconductor have been widely used in nanoelectronic devices.[3,4,30–33] Most of these nanodevices work in the environment of an electric field,[7,34–38] resulting in the fact that the free charges can appear on the surface of nanostructure. These residual charges can change the surface stress due to the Hellman–Feynman force generated by surface charges, and such an additional surface stress is linearly related to surface charge density.[39–41] The charge-induced surface stress can modify the surface energy, leading to the change of elastic modulus of nanostructures,[42–46] which is related to the phonon properties in semiconductor nanostructure. In this work, we study the influences of surface charges on the phonon properties and thermal properties of GaN nanofilms.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In subsection
When a nanostructure device actually works in an electric field, it is easy to generate surface charges for the nanostructures. The surface charge density will directly affect the equivalent elastic modulus of the nanostructure. This is because the surface stress varies with the change of the surface charge density, and the elastic properties of the nanostructure are sensitive to the surface stress or surface energy.[47] From the theoretical description of confined phonons by continuous elastic model, the change of elastic modulus will affect the phonon properties. Based on the continuum mechanics, the effective elastic modulus tensor of the surface charged-nanostructure can be expressed as[47]
Since the phonons are related to the vibration of atoms, the elastic model for vibration can be utilized to describe the spatially confined phonons approximately in semiconductor nanostructures.[48–52] Quantization of phonon energy in nanostructures can be achieved based on the elastic model. It has been proved that the elastic model can successfully describe the confined phonons in semiconductor nanostructures.[13,20,53–55] The vibration equation in the elastic model of nanofilm can be expressed as
Then, three modes for the phonons in surface charged-nanofilms can be obtained. For the shear (SH) mode, the eigenequation of vibration and the corresponding boundary conditions are
After deriving the phonon dispersion relations of surface charged nanofilm in the different modes, the phonon frequency can be numerically calculated by using the finite element method with phonon wave vector q0. Then, the phonon group velocity with a given phonon mode number n can also be achieved numerically
As mentioned above, we use the finite difference method to calculate the phonon dispersion relationships of surface charged-GaN nanofilm under different modes. Here, the surface charge densities are taken as −10 C/m2, 0, and 10 C/m2. The other parameters in scattering time are adopted from the literature.[48–51] For simplicity, the SH mode is taken for example to explore the influences of surface charges on the phonon properties and thermal properties of GaN nanofilms. Figure
After the phonon dispersion relationship is determined, the phonon average group velocity can be calculated based on Eqs. (
Figure
When the phonon dispersion relations and phonon group velocities are achieved, one can calculate the various scattering rates under different surface/interface stresses, including Umklapp scattering rate, point-defect scattering rate, and phonon–electron scattering rate, which are shown in Fig.
According to the expression of phonon thermal conductivity in Eq. (
Figure
Figure
In this work, the effects of surface charges on the phonon and thermal properties have been investigated theoretically. The surface charges modify the elastic constants in nanostructures, leading to the change of phonon properties of semiconductor nanofilms. The elastic model is used to describe the phonon properties of surface charged-GaN nanofilms. Then, the phonon dispersion relation, the phonon average group velocity, and the phonon density of states for the surface charged-GaN nanofilms are simulated. Finally, the effects of surface charges on the phonon thermal conductivity of GaN nanofilms with different temperatures and film thickness values are analyzed. The numerical results demonstrate that when the surface charges can significantly modify the phonon properties and phonon thermal conductivity, these surface charges can also change the temperature and size dependence of the phonon thermal conductivity. This work will be helpful in adjusting and controlling the phonon properties and thermal conductivity in nanostructured components and nanodevices by changing the surface charges.
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