Silicon Nanowire Conductance in the Ballistic Regime: Models and Simulation

This paper deals with phonon heat transport in silicon nanowires. A review of various techniques that can be used to assess thermal conductance of such nanodevices is presented and a peculiar attention is paid to the case of the Landauer Formalism that can describe extremely thin wires. Several models for normal modes of silicon nanowire determination are considered, among them elastic wave theory has been used to determine the normal mode number. Besides, transmission and reflection of phonon at the interface between two nanostructures is discussed. Calculations and comparisons of thermal conductance of a 20 nm silicon nanowire between bulk thermal reservoirs are thus discussed.