Simulation of thermal conductance across dimensionally mismatched graphene interfaces

This paper considers phonon transport behavior in graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) that bridge semi-infinite graphene contacts. The work employs an atomistic Green's function (AGF) method to investigate phonon wave effects in GNRs with both zigzag and armchair edges. Thermal conductances are found to be sensitive to the edge shape of the ribbons; a sandwiched zigzag GNR structure has almost twice the thermal conductance of the corresponding armchair structure. Results show that the graphene/GNR interface moderately reduces phonon conductance compared to a freestanding GNR. At fixed device lengths, conductance increases with the width of GNR. On the other hand, conductance decreases with GNR length. The zigzag ribbons show smaller reduction upon increasing of GNR length than armchair ribbons; the conductances of both ribbons converge to a length-independent value. For very short devices, thermal conductance can exceed that of a single graphene-GNR interface. (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3514119]