Phonon transmission in III-V semiconductor superlattices and alloys

We have used the transfer matrix approach to investigate the LA phonon transmission along the [0 0 1] growth direction in GaAs/GaAlAs superlattices and in Ga1-xAlxAs alloys. Our calculated minigap in the phonon dispersion induced by the zone folding matches reasonably to the phonon filtering experiment. However, in the regime of phonon ballistic transport, we found insignificant effect of zone folding on phonon thermal conductance. On the other hand, the alloy scatterings largely suppress the phonon transmission probability and so lower the phonon thermal conductance of alloys.