Fermi Surface Nesting and Phonon Frequency Gap Drive Anomalous Thermal Transport

The lattice thermal conductivity, k(L), of typical metallic and nonmetallic crystals decreases rapidly with increasing temperature because phonons interact more strongly with other phonons than they do with electrons. Using first principles calculations, we show that k(L) can become nearly independent of temperature in metals that have nested Fermi surfaces and large frequency gaps between acoustic and optic phonons. Then, the interactions between phonons and electrons become much stronger than the mutual interactions between phonons, giving the fundamentally different k(L) behavior. This striking trend is revealed here in the group V transition metal carbides, vanadium carbide, niobium carbide, and tantalum carbide, and it should also occur in several other metal compounds. This work gives insights into the physics of heat conduction in solids and identifies a new heat flow regime driven by the interplay between Fermi surfaces and phonon dispersions.