Atomic-Scale Three-Dimensional Phononic Crystals With a Very Low Thermal Conductivity to Design Crystalline Thermoelectric Devices

Superlattices with thermal-insulating behaviors have been studied to design thermoelectric materials but affect heat transfer in only one main direction and often show many cracks and dislocations near their layer interfaces. Quantum-dot (QD) self-assembly is an emerging epitaxial technology to design ultradense arrays of germanium QDs in silicon for many promising electronic and photonic applications such as quantum computing, where accurate QD positioning is required. We theoretically demonstrate that high-density three-dimensional (3D) arrays of molecular-size self-assembled Ge QDs in Si can also show very low thermal conductivity in the three spatial directions. This physical property can be considered in designing new silicon-based crystalline thermoelectric devices, which are compatible with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. To obtain a computationally manageable model of these nanomaterials, we investigate their thermal-insulating behavior with atomic-scale 3D phononic crystals: A phononic-crystal period or supercell consists of diamond-cubic (DC) Si cells. At each supercell center, we substitute Si atoms by Ge atoms in a given number of DC unit cells to form a boxlike nanoparticle (i.e., QD). The nanomaterial thermal conductivity can be reduced by several orders of magnitude compared with bulk Si. A part of this reduction is due to the significant decrease in the phonon group velocities derived from the flat dispersion curves, which are computed with classical lattice dynamics. Moreover, according to the wave-particle duality at small scales, another reduction is obtained from multiple scattering of the particlelike phonons in nanoparticle clusters, which breaks their mean free paths (MFPs) in the 3D nanoparticle array. However, we use an incoherent analytical model of this particlelike scattering. This model leads to overestimations of the MFPs and thermal conductivity, which is nevertheless lower than the minimal Einstein limit of bulk Si and is reduced by a factor of at least 165 compared with bulk Si in an example nanomaterial. We expect an even larger decrease in the thermal conductivity than that predicted in this paper owing to multiple scattering, which can lead to a $ZT$ much larger than unity.