Thermal conductance for single wall carbon nanotubes

Qingrong Zheng1,3, Gang Su1,a, Jian Wang2, and Hong Guo3 1

Department of Physics, The Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, PO Box 3908, Beijing 100039, PR China 2 Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong 3 Centre for the Physics of Materials, Department of Physics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T8

Received 12 June 2001

Abstract. We report a theoretical analysis of the phonon thermal conductance, κ(T), for single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCN). In a range of low temperatues up to 100 K, κ(T) of perfect SWCN is found to increase with temperature, approximately, in a parabolic fashion. This is qualitatively consistent with recent experimental measurements where the tube-tube interactions are negligibly weak. When the carboncarbon bond length is slightly varied, κ(T) is found to be qualitatively unaltered which implies that the anharmonic effect does not change the qualitative behavior of κ(T).

PACS. 61.46.+w Nanoscale materials: clusters, nanoparticles, nanotubes, and nanocrystals – 44.10.+i Heat conduction – 63.22.+m Phonons or vibrational states in low-dimensional structures and nanoscale materials