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Updated: Apr 18, 2026

Characterization of Thermal Transport in One-dimensional Solid Materials
Published on: January 26, 2014
Temperature-dependent thermal conductivities of one-dimensional nonlinear Klein-Gordon lattices with a soft on-site
Linlin Yang1, Nianbei Li1, Baowen Li2
1Center for Phononics and Thermal Energy Science, School of Physics Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 200092 Shanghai, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
The temperature-dependent thermal conductivities of one-dimensional nonlinear Klein-Gordon lattices with soft on-site potential (soft-KG) are investigated systematically. Similarly to the previously studied hard-KG lattices, the existence of renormalized phonons is also confirmed in soft-KG lattices. In particular, the temperature dependence of the renormalized phonon frequency predicted by a classical field theory is verified by detailed numerical simulations. However, the thermal conductivities of soft-KG lattices exhibit the opposite trend in temperature dependence in comparison with those of hard-KG lattices. The interesting thing is that the temperature-dependent thermal conductivities of both soft- and hard-KG lattices can be interpreted in the same framework of effective phonon theory. According to the effective phonon theory, the exponents of the power-law dependence of the thermal conductivities as a function of temperature are only determined by the exponents of the soft or hard on-site potentials. These theoretical predictions are consistently verified very well by extensive numerical simulations.
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