A two-step metal assisted chemical etching technique is used to systematically vary the sidewall roughness of Si nanowires in vertically aligned arrays. The thermal conductivities of nanowire arrays are studied using time domain thermoreflectance and compared to their high-resolution transmission electron microscopy determined roughness. The thermal conductivity of nanowires with small roughness is close to a theoretical prediction based on an upper limit of the mean-free-paths of phonons given by the nanowire diameter. The thermal conductivity of nanowires with large roughness is found to be significantly below this prediction. Raman spectroscopy reveals that nanowires with large roughness also display significant broadening of the one-phonon peak; the broadening correlates well with the reduction in thermal conductivity. The origin of this broadening is not yet understood, as it is inconsistent with phonon confinement models, but could derive from microstructural changes that affect both the optical phonons observed in Raman scattering and the acoustic phonons that are important for heat conduction. V
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Frequency dependence in phonon surface scattering is a debated topic in fundamental phonon physics. Recent experiments and theory suggest such a phenomenon, but an independent agreement between the two remains elusive. We report low-temperature dependence of thermal conductivity in silicon nanowires fabricated using a two-step, metal-assisted chemical etch. By reducing etch rates down to 0.5 nm/s from the typical >100 nm/s, we report controllable roughening of nanowire surfaces and selectively focus on moderate roughness scales rather than the extreme scales investigated previously. This critically enables direct comparison with perturbation-based spectral scattering theory. Using experimentally characterized surface roughness, we show that a multiple scattering theory provides excellent agreement and explanation of the observed low-temperature dependence of rough surface nanowires. The theory does not employ any fitting parameters. A 5-10 nm roughness correlation length is typical in metal-assisted chemical etching and resonantly scatters dominant phonons in silicon, leading to the observed ~T(1.6-2.4) behavior. Our work provides fundamental and quantitative insight into spectral phonon scattering from rough surfaces. This advances applications of nanowires in thermoelectric energy conversion.
We report deterministic assembly of 100 nm thick suspended gold films using transfer printing that are mechanically collapsible. We demonstrate the latter using electrostatic force to establish and break physical contact between the film and a silicon dioxide substrate in a reversible and repeatable manner. Modeling the thermal conductance at the interface between the suspended film and the substrate, we show that the fabricated structure behaves as a thermal switch. The on-state corresponds to the collapsed film and the off-state to the fully suspended film. The onto off-state ratio for thermal conductance exceeds 10 6 in theory. V
Parallel nanoimaging using an array of 30 heated AFM cantilevers is reported. The measurement speed and area are increased over standard AFM by two orders of magnitude.
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