Enhancing the thermal conductivity of semiconductor thin films via phonon funneling

The second law of thermodynamics asserts that energy diffuses from hot to cold. The resulting temperature gradients drive the efficiencies and failures in a plethora of technologies. However, as the dimensionalities of materials shrink to the nanoscale regime, proper heat dissipation strategies become more challenging since the mean free paths of phonons become larger than the characteristic length scales. This leads to temperature gradients that are dependent on interfaces and boundaries, which ultimately can lead to severe thermal bottlenecks. Herein, we uncover a phenomenon which we refer to as ‘phonon funneling’, that allows the control of phonon transport to preferentially direct phonon energy away from geometrically confined interfacial thermal bottlenecks and into localized colder regions. This phenomenon supersedes heat diffusion based on the macroscale temperature gradients, thus introducing a nanoscale regime in which boundary scattering increases the phonon thermal conductivity of thin films, an opposite effect than what is traditionally realized. This work advances the fundamental understanding of phonon transport at the nanoscale and the role of efficient scattering methods for enhancing thermal transport.