Phonon mean free path of graphite along the<i>c</i>-axis

Abstract

Phonon transport in the c-axis direction of graphite thin films has been studied using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The simulation results show that the c-axis thermal conductivities for films of thickness ranging from 20 to 500 atomic layers are significantly lower than the bulk value. Based on the MD data, a method is developed to construct the c-axis thermal conductivity as an accumulation function of phonon mean free path (MFP), from which we show that phonons with MFPs from 2 to 2000 nm contribute ∼80% of the graphite c-axis thermal conductivity at room temperature, and phonons with MFPs larger than 100 nm contribute over 40% to the c-axis thermal conductivity. These findings indicate that the commonly believed value of just a few nanometers from the simple kinetic theory drastically underestimates the c-axis phonon MFP of graphite.