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Updated: Jul 2, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Breakdown of Fourier's law in nanotube thermal conductors
1Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, California 94720, USA. chihwei@berkeley.edu
Abstract:
We present experimental evidence that the room temperature thermal conductivity (kappa) of individual multiwalled carbon and boron-nitride nanotubes does not obey Fourier's empirical law of thermal conduction. Because of isotopic disorder, kappa's of carbon nanotubes and boron-nitride nanotubes show different length dependence behavior. Moreover, for these systems we find that Fourier's law is violated even when the phonon mean free path is much shorter than the sample length.
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