Theoretical analysis of thermal boundary conductance of MoS2-SiO2and WS2-SiO2interface

Nanotechnology. 2020 Dec 9. doi: 10.1088/1361-6528/abd208. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

Understanding the physical processes involved in interfacial heat transfer is critical for the interpretation of thermometric measurements and the optimization of heat dissipation in nanoelectronic devices that are based on transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors. We model the phononic and electronic contributions to the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) variability for the MoS2-SiO2and WS2-SiO2interface. A phenomenological theory to model diffuse phonon transport at disordered interfaces is introduced and yieldsG= 13.5 and 12.4 MW/K/m2at 300 K for the MoS2-SiO2and WS2-SiO2interface, respectively. We compare its predictions to those of the coherent phonon model and find that the former fits the MoS2-SiO2data from experiments and simulations significantly better. Our analysis suggests that heat dissipation at the TMD-SiO2interface is dominated by phonons scattered diffusely by the rough interface although the electronic TBC contribution can be significant even at low electron densities (n= 1012cm-2) and may explain some of the variation in the experimental TBC data from the literature. The physical insights from our study can be useful for the development of thermally aware designs in TMD-based nanoelectronics.

Keywords: 2D materials; phonon; thermal boundary conductance; transition metal dichalcogenides.