Thermal Transport in Graphene Supported on Copper

The present study investigates the thermal transport in suspended graphene and graphene supported on copper substrate using equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations, Green-Kubo method and relaxation time approximation (RTA) approach. The thermal coupling between graphene and copper substrate was investigated by varying the interaction strength between the carbon atoms and Cu atoms at the interface. The contribution of different phonon modes to the thermal conductivity of suspended and supported graphene was analyzed in order to elucidate the graphene-substrate thermal interactions. The thermal conductivity of graphene decreases with the increasing strength of the interfacial interaction. The analysis shows that the interactions with copper substrate can reduce the thermal conductivity by up to 44%. The decrease of thermal conductivity is primarily due to the suppression of contribution from out-of-plane acoustic (ZA) phonons in the large wave vector region.