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Updated: May 14, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Thermal conductivity and phonon transport in suspended few-layer hexagonal boron nitride
Insun Jo1, Michael Thompson Pettes, Jaehyun Kim
1Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Abstract:
The thermal conductivity of suspended few-layer hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) was measured using a microbridge device with built-in resistance thermometers. Based on the measured thermal resistance values of 11-12 atomic layer h-BN samples with suspended lengths ranging between 3 and 7.5 μm, the room-temperature thermal conductivity of a 11-layer sample was found to be about 360 W m(-1) K(-1), approaching the basal plane value reported for bulk h-BN. The presence of a polymer residue layer on the sample surface was found to decrease the thermal conductivity of a 5-layer h-BN sample to be about 250 W m(-1) K(-1) at 300 K. Thermal conductivities for both the 5-layer and the 11-layer samples are suppressed at low temperatures, suggesting increasing scattering of low frequency phonons in thin h-BN samples by polymer residue.
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