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Minimum thermal conductivity of superlattices
1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-1200 and and Solid State Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831, USA.
Physical Review Letters
|October 4, 2000
Abstract:
The phonon thermal conductivity of a multilayer is calculated for transport perpendicular to the layers. There is a crossover between particle transport for thick layers to wave transport for thin layers. The calculations show that the conductivity has a minimum value for a layer thickness somewhat smaller then the mean free path of the phonons.