Ultrahigh thermal conductivity in isotope-enriched cubic boron nitride

Ke Chen; Bai Song; Navaneetha K Ravichandran; Qiye Zheng; Xi Chen; Hwijong Lee; Haoran Sun; Sheng Li; Geethal Amila Gamage Udalamatta Gamage; Fei Tian; Zhiwei Ding; Qichen Song; Akash Rai; Hanlin Wu; Pawan Koirala; Aaron J Schmidt; Kenji Watanabe; Bing Lv; Zhifeng Ren; Li Shi; David G Cahill; Takashi Taniguchi; David Broido; Gang Chen

doi:10.1126/science.aaz6149

Ultrahigh thermal conductivity in isotope-enriched cubic boron nitride

Science. 2020 Jan 31;367(6477):555-559. doi: 10.1126/science.aaz6149. Epub 2020 Jan 9.

Authors

Ke Chen^#¹, Bai Song^#², Navaneetha K Ravichandran^#³, Qiye Zheng⁴, Xi Chen⁵, Hwijong Lee⁵, Haoran Sun⁶, Sheng Li⁷, Geethal Amila Gamage Udalamatta Gamage⁶, Fei Tian⁶, Zhiwei Ding¹, Qichen Song¹, Akash Rai⁴, Hanlin Wu⁷, Pawan Koirala⁷, Aaron J Schmidt¹, Kenji Watanabe⁸, Bing Lv⁷, Zhifeng Ren⁶, Li Shi^{5

9}, David G Cahill⁴, Takashi Taniguchi⁸, David Broido¹⁰, Gang Chen²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. songbai@pku.edu.cn broido@bc.edu gchen2@mit.edu.
³ Department of Physics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
⁵ Materials Science and Engineering Program, Texas Materials Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
⁶ Department of Physics and Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75080, USA.
⁸ National Institute for Materials Science, Namiki 1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan.
⁹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Physics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. songbai@pku.edu.cn broido@bc.edu gchen2@mit.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 31919128
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz6149

Abstract

Materials with high thermal conductivity (κ) are of technological importance and fundamental interest. We grew cubic boron nitride (cBN) crystals with controlled abundance of boron isotopes and measured κ greater than 1600 watts per meter-kelvin at room temperature in samples with enriched ¹⁰B or ¹¹B. In comparison, we found that the isotope enhancement of κ is considerably lower for boron phosphide and boron arsenide as the identical isotopic mass disorder becomes increasingly invisible to phonons. The ultrahigh κ in conjunction with its wide bandgap (6.2 electron volts) makes cBN a promising material for microelectronics thermal management, high-power electronics, and optoelectronics applications.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.