Thermal Interface Conductance Between Aluminum and Silicon by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Nuo Yang (1) , Tengfei Luo (2) , Keivan Esfarjani (3) , Asegun Henry (4) , Zhiting Tian (5) , Junichiro Shiomi (6) , Yann Chalopin (7) , Baowen Li (8) , Gang Chen (9)

1 HUST - Huazhong University of Science and Technology [Wuhan]
2 UND - University of Notre Dame [Indiana]
3 Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering Rutgers University
4 Georgia Institute of Technology [Atlanta]
5 MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
6 Department of Mechanical Engineering
7 EM2C - Laboratoire d'Énergétique Moléculaire et Macroscopique, Combustion
8 NUS - National University of Singapore
9 MIT-MECHE - Department of Mechanical Engineering [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

The thermal interface conductance between Al and Si was simulated by a non-equilibrium molecular dynamics method. In the simulations, the coupling between electrons and phonons in Al are considered by using a stochastic force. The results show the size dependence of the interface thermal conductance and the effect of electron phonon coupling on the interface thermal conductance. To understand the mechanism of interface resistance, the vibration power spectra are calculated. We find that the atomic level disorder near the interface is an important aspect of interfacial phonon transport, which leads to a modification of the phonon states near the interface. There, the vibrational spectrum near the interface greatly differs from the bulk. This change in the vibrational spectrum affects the results predicted by AMM and DMM theories and indicates new physics is involved with phonon transport across interfaces.

Keywords: Molecular Dynamics; Phonons; Electron Phonon Couplings; Thermal Interface Conductance; Aluminum and Silicon; Atomic Level Disorder

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]

Nuo Yang, Tengfei Luo, Keivan Esfarjani, Asegun Henry, Zhiting Tian, et al.. Thermal Interface Conductance Between Aluminum and Silicon by Molecular Dynamics Simulations. Journal of computational and theoretical nanoscience, 2015, 12 (2), pp.168-174. ⟨10.1166/jctn.2015.3710⟩. ⟨hal-02398410⟩