Thermal transport properties of antimonene: an ab initio study

Searching for low thermal conductivity materials is crucial for thermoelectric devices. Here we report on the phonon transport properties of recently fabricated single layer antimony, antimonene [Ares, et al., Adv. Mater., 2016, 28, 6332]. Ab initio calculations in combination with the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) for phonons show that antimonene has a low lattice thermal conductivity (15.1 W m^-1 K^-1 at 300 K), indicating its potential thermoelectric applications. The low lattice thermal conductivity is due to its small group velocity, low Debye temperature and large buckling height. We also investigate in detail the mode contributions to total thermal conductivity and find at low frequency that the longitudinal acoustic (LA) branch dominates the thermal conductivity. Moreover, we show that the lattice thermal conductivity of antimonene can further be reduced by minimizing the sample size. Our findings open the field for thermoelectric applications based on antimonene.