Related papers: Phonon Collapse and Second-Order Phase Transition …
The microscopic arrangement of atoms and molecules is the determining factor in how materials behave and perform. Beyond the long-range periodicity, the local disorder with local structures deviating from the average lattice structure plays…
Thermoelectric material provides a high hope for converting harmful and useless heat into useful energy, electricity. It can also be used as solid state Peltier coolers in integrated circuits, an outstanding challenge for electronic…
Introducing hierarchical disorder from multiple defects into materials through nanostructuring is one of the most promising directions to achieve extremely low thermal conductivities and thus improve thermoelectric performance. The success…
Superlattice-like phase change memory (SL-PCM) promises lower switching current than conventional PCM based on Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST). However, a fundamental understanding of SL-PCM requires detailed characterization of the interfaces within such…
Stable structures of layered SnS and SnSe and their associated electronic and vibrational spectra are predicted using first-principles DFT calculations. The calculations show that both materials undergo a phase transformation upon thinning…
Stoichiometric SnTe is theoretically a small gap semiconductor that undergoes a ferroelectric distortion on cooling. In reality however, crystals are always non-stoichiometric and metallic; the ferroelectric transition is therefore more…
We experimentally investigate transport properties of a hybrid structure, which consists of a thin single crystal SnSe flake on a top of 5~$\mu$m spaced Au leads. The structure initially is in highly-conductive state, while it can be…
We have used a combination of ultrafast coherent phonon spectroscopy, ultrafast thermometry, and time-dependent Landau theory to study the inversion symmetry breaking phase transition at $T_c = 200$ K in the strongly spin-orbit coupled…
In the design of materials with low lattice thermal conductivity, compounds with high density, low speed of sound, and complexity at either the atomic, nano- or microstructural level are preferred. The layered compound Mg$_3$Sb$_2$ defies…
Prior experimental studies showed that nanowires are promising structures for improving the thermoelectric performance of practical thermoelectric materials due to the strongly induced phonon-boundary scattering. However, few studies…
Slack's phonon-glass and electron-crystal concept has been the guiding paradigm for designing new thermoelectric materials. Zintl phases, in principle, have been shown as great contenders of the concept and thereby good thermoelectric…
We explicitly consider both phonon energy shifts and broadening arising from both cubic and quartic anharmonicities, as well as diagonal/non-diagonal terms of heat flux operators in thermal conductivity. Our findings show that the strong…
Thermodynamic stability and vibrational anharmonicity of single layer black phosphorene (SLBP) are studied using a spectral energy density (SED) method. Thermal stability of SLBP sheet is analyzed by computing phonon dispersion at 300 K,…
Contradictory experiments have been reported about the dimensionality effect on the charge-density-wave transition in 2H NbSe$_2$. While scanning tunnelling experiments on single layers grown by molecular beam epitaxy measure a…
Strain engineering is a very effective method to continuously tune the electronic, topological, optical and thermoelectric properties of materials. In this work, strain-dependent phonon transport of recently-fabricated antimonene (Sb…
Due to potential applications in nano- and opto-electronics, two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted tremendous interest. Their thermal transport properties are closely related to the performance of 2D materials-based devices. Here,…
Inelastic light scattering studies on single crystal of electron-doped Ca(Fe0.95Co0.05)2As2 superconductor, covering the tetragonal to orthorhombic structural transition as well as magnetic transition at TSM ~ 140 K and superconducting…
Effects of strong phonon anharmonicity of a type-I clathrate Ba$_{\rm 8}$Ga$_{\rm 16}$Sn$_{\rm 30}$ induced by quadruple-well potential of guest atoms were investigated. Phonon transport including coherent interbranch component was analyzed…
Understanding the coupling between structural phase transitions and thermal transport is essential for designing functional materials with tunable properties. Here, we investigate this interplay in CaSnF$_6$ by combining first-principles…
One account of two-dimensional (2D) structural transformations in 2D ferroelectrics predicts an evolution from a structure with Pnm2$_1$ symmetry into a structure with square P4/nmm symmetry and is consistent with experimental evidence,…