Understanding thermal transport from nanoscale heat sources is important for a fundamental description of energy flow in materials, as well as for many technological applications including thermal management in nanoelectronics and optoelectronics, thermoelectric devices, nanoenhanced photovoltaics, and nanoparticle-mediated thermal therapies. Thermal transport at the nanoscale is fundamentally different from that at the macroscale and is determined by the distribution of carrier mean free paths and energy dispersion in a material, the length scales of the heat sources, and the distance over which heat is transported. Past work has shown that Fourier's law for heat conduction dramatically overpredicts the rate of heat dissipation from heat sources with dimensions smaller than the mean free path of the dominant heat-carrying phonons. In this work, we uncover a new regime of nanoscale thermal transport that dominates when the separation between nanoscale heat sources is small compared with the dominant phonon mean free paths. Surprisingly, the interaction of phonons originating from neighboring heat sources enables more efficient diffusive-like heat dissipation, even from nanoscale heat sources much smaller than the dominant phonon mean free paths. This finding suggests that thermal management in nanoscale systems including integrated circuits might not be as challenging as previously projected. Finally, we demonstrate a unique capability to extract differential conductivity as a function of phonon mean free path in materials, allowing the first (to our knowledge) experimental validation of predictions from the recently developed first-principles calculations.nanoscale thermal transport | nondiffusive transport | mean free path spectroscopy | high harmonic generation | ultrafast X-rays C ritical applications including thermoelectrics for energy harvesting, nanoparticle-mediated thermal therapy, nanoenhanced photovoltaics, and thermal management in integrated circuits require a comprehensive understanding of energy flow at the nanoscale. Recent work has shown that the rate of heat dissipation from a heat source is reduced significantly below that predicted by Fourier's law for diffusive heat transfer when the characteristic dimension of the heat source is smaller than the mean free path (MFP) of the dominant heat carriers (phonons in dielectric and semiconductor materials) (1-6). However, a complete fundamental description of nanoscale thermal transport is still elusive, and current theoretical efforts are limited by a lack of experimental validation.Diffusive heat transfer requires many collisions among heat carriers to establish a local thermal equilibrium and a continuous temperature gradient along which energy dissipates. However, when the dimension of a heat source is smaller than the phonon MFP, the diffusion equation is intrinsically invalid because phonons move ballistically without collisions. The rate of nanoscale heat dissipation is significantly lower than the diffusive prediction such that smaller heat ...

High-frequency surface acoustic waves can be generated by ultrafast laser excitation of nanoscale patterned surfaces. Here we study this phenomenon in the hypersonic frequency limit. By modeling the thermomechanics from first-principles, we calculate the system’s initial heat-driven impulsive response and follow its time evolution. A scheme is introduced to quantitatively access frequencies and lifetimes of the composite system’s excited eigenmodes. A spectral decomposition of the calculated response on the eigemodes of the system reveals asymmetric resonances that result from the coupling between surface and bulk acoustic modes. This finding allows evaluation of impulsively excited pseudosurface acoustic wave frequencies and lifetimes and expands our understanding of the scattering of surface waves in mesoscale metamaterials. The model is successfully benchmarked against time-resolved optical diffraction measurements performed on one-dimensional and two-dimensional surface phononic crystals, probed using light at extreme ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths.

We present a theoretical framework allowing to properly address the nature of surfacelike eigenmodes in a hypersonic surface phononic crystal, a composite structure made of periodic metal stripes of nanometer size and periodicity of 1 m, deposited over a semi-infinite silicon substrate. In surface-based phononic crystals there is no distinction between the eigenmodes of the periodically nanostructured overlayer and the surface acoustic modes of the semi-infinite substrate, the solution of the elastic equation being a pseudosurface acoustic wave partially localized on the nanostructures and radiating energy into the bulk. This problem is particularly severe in the hypersonic frequency range, where semi-infinite substrate's surface acoustic modes strongly couple to the periodic overlayer, thus preventing any perturbative approach. We solve the problem introducing a surface-likeness coefficient as a tool allowing to find pseudosurface acoustic waves and to calculate their line shapes. Having accessed the pseudosurface modes of the composite structure, the same theoretical frame allows reporting on the gap opening in the now well-defined pseudo-SAW frequency spectrum. We show how the filling fraction, mass loading, and geometric factors affect both the frequency gap, and how the mechanical energy is scattered out of the surface waveguiding modes.