Phonon transport properties in pillared silicon film

The phonon transport property of pillared silicon film is systematically investigated by molecular dynamics simulation and lattice dynamics calculation. It is found that the thermal conductivity can be reduced to as low as 28.6% of the conductivity of plain ones. Although the reduced thermal conductivity can be explained qualitatively by increased surface roughness, our calculations show that the pillars modify the phonon dispersion relation and reduce the phonon group velocity due to the local resonance effects. Furthermore, by analyzing the participation ratio spectra, it is shown that the pillars reduce the mode participation ratio over the whole range of frequency. We found that the mode localization around the pillars is another important factor to reduce the thermal conductivity of pillared film. The present investigations indicate that the pillared film may have potential application in thermoelectric energy conversion. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.