We present a study of thermal conductivity, κ, in undoped and doped strontium titanate in a wide temperature range (2-400 K) and detecting different regimes of heat flow. In undoped SrTiO3, κ evolves faster than cubic with temperature below its peak and in a narrow temperature window. Such a behavior, previously observed in a handful of solids, has been attributed to a Poiseuille flow of phonons, expected to arise when momentum-conserving scattering events outweigh momentum-degrading ones. The effect disappears in presence of dopants. In SrTi1−xNbxO3, a significant reduction in lattice thermal conductivity starts below the temperature at which the average interdopant distance and the thermal wavelength of acoustic phonons become comparable. In the high-temperature regime, thermal diffusivity becomes proportional to the inverse of temperature, with a prefactor set by sound velocity and Planckian time (τp=kBTℏ).
@article{arxiv.1802.05868,
title = {Thermal transport and phonon hydrodynamics in strontium titanate},
author = {Valentina Martelli and Julio Larrea Jiménez and Mucio Continentino and Elisa Baggio-Saitovitch and Kamran Behnia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.05868},
year = {2018}
}