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Thermal bridging of graphene nanosheets via covalent molecular junctions: A non-equilibrium Green’s functions–density functional tight-binding study

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Abstract

Despite the uniquely high thermal conductivity of graphene is well known, the exploitation of graphene into thermally conductive nanomaterials and devices is limited by the inefficiency of thermal contacts between the individual nanosheets. A fascinating yet experimentally challenging route to enhance thermal conductance at contacts between graphene nanosheets is through molecular junctions, allowing covalently connecting nanosheets, otherwise interacting only via weak Van der Waals forces. Beside the bare existence of covalent connections, the choice of molecular structures to be used as thermal junctions should be guided by their vibrational properties, in terms of phonon transfer through the molecular junction. In this paper, density functional tight-binding combined with Green’s functions formalism was applied for the calculation of thermal conductance and phonon spectra of several different aliphatic and aromatic molecular junctions between graphene nanosheets. Effects of molecular junction length, conformation, and aromaticity were studied in detail and correlated with phonon tunnelling spectra. The theoretical insight provided by this work can guide future experimental studies to select suitable molecular junctions, in order to enhance the thermal transport by suppressing the interfacial thermal resistances. This is attractive for various systems, including graphene nanopapers and graphene polymer nanocomposites, as well as related devices. In a broader view, the possibility to design molecular junctions to control phonon transport currently appears as an efficient way to produce phononic devices and controlling heat management in nanostructures.

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Acknowledgements

This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement 639495 — INTHERM — ERC-2014-STG. L. M. S. thanks the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for the financial support. This work has also been partly supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Cluster of Excellence “Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden”. B. M. greatly acknowledges the financial support by European Research Council for COMBAT project (Grant number 615132).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienza Applicata e Tecnologia, Politecnico di Torino, 15121, Alessandria, Italy

    Diego Martinez Gutierrez, Alessandro Di Pierro, Mar Bernal, Guido Saracco & Alberto Fina

  2. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ISMN, 00017, Monterotondo, Italy

    Alessandro Pecchia

  3. Institute for Materials Science and Max Bergmann Center of Biomaterials, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Leonardo Medrano Sandonas, Rafael Gutierrez & Gianaurelio Cuniberti

  4. Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Leonardo Medrano Sandonas & Gianaurelio Cuniberti

  5. Institute of Structural Mechanics, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, D-99423, Weimar, Germany

    Bohayra Mortazavi

  6. Dresden Center for Computational Materials Science, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Gianaurelio Cuniberti

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  1. Diego Martinez Gutierrez
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  2. Alessandro Di Pierro
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Correspondence to Alberto Fina.

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Thermal bridging of graphene nanosheets via covalent molecular junctions: A non-equilibrium Green’s functions–density functional tight-binding study

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Martinez Gutierrez, D., Di Pierro, A., Pecchia, A. et al. Thermal bridging of graphene nanosheets via covalent molecular junctions: A non-equilibrium Green’s functions–density functional tight-binding study. Nano Res. 12, 791–799 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2290-2

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