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Updated: Aug 6, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Universality of one-dimensional heat conductivity
1Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA.
Abstract:
We show analytically that the heat conductivity of oscillator chains diverges with system size N as N(1/3), which is the same as for one-dimensional fluids. For long cylinders, we use the hydrodynamic equations for a crystal in one dimension. This is appropriate for stiff systems such as nanotubes, where the eventual crossover to a fluid only sets in at unrealistically large . Despite the extra equation compared to a fluid, the scaling of the heat conductivity is unchanged. For strictly one-dimensional chains, we show that the dynamic equations are those of a fluid at all length scales even if the static order extends to very large . The discrepancy between our results and numerical simulations on Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chains is discussed.
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