Influence of phonon-phonon interactions on the Joule heating of metallic single walled carbon nanotubes
Pierre Gautreau (University at Buffalo), Yanbiao Chu (University at Buffalo), Cemal Basaran (University at Buffalo)
Synthesis, Characterization, and Modeling of Low-Dimensional Nanomaterials
Wed 9:00 - 10:30
Salomon 202
Graphene is a one atom thick planar sheet of carbon atoms, which are connected to each other with sp2 bonds. It is often described as an atomic scale “chicken wire” structure, or a “honeycomb” crystal lattice. Graphene is the building block of many nanostructures. It can be folded into a tube, thus creating carbon nanotubes; graphene sheets can also be stacked to form graphite. These structures have attracted a lot of attention over the past few years, due to their potential applications in Mechanical, Structural, and Electrical Engineering. Carbon based nanoelectronics is a strong candidate to replace metal oxide electronic devices conventionally used in the electronic industry. CNTs and graphene do not exhibit failure mechanisms such as thermo-migration and electro-migration as compared to metals. The nano-scale of CNTs, however, makes experimentation difficult. Therefore, computational simulations can be used to study and analyze effects and behaviors of CNTs under various electrical or mechanical loadings. The goal of this study is to determine the influence of phonon-phonon interactions on the Joule heating of metallic single walled carbon nanotubes. Phonon-phonon scattering rates are calculated from quantum mechanics coupled with Brenner’s potential. The Joule heating is then calculated using an Ensemble Monte-Carlo (EMC) simulation to directly sum the heating contribution of scattering events inside the CNT.