Our invited review of transport in heterostructures, published in Annalen der Physik, is among the top downloaded papers of 2019. Here is a link to that paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/andp.201800510

Our manuscript on heat dissipation in few-layer 2D WSe2 and its impact on transport has just been accepted in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.9b22039 Great work by Arnab Kumar Majee in collaboration with Prof. Amin Salehi-Khijin’s group at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Our lab has been awarded a three-year Computational and Data-enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) grant from the National Science Foundation to study thermal transport across interfaces between 2D materials and 3D substrates. Using first-principles methods, we will identify 2D-3D materials pairings that lead to better heat removal, enabling faster and higher-performance 2D nanoelectronics. For more info: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1902352

Here is our newest article, just accepted in the new open-access Journal of Physics: Materials, in which we identify materials properties that will lead to higher thermoelectric power factors in two-dimensional materials. This work will help researchers discover new 2D TEs in the future: https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7639/ab4600

Meenakshi’s work, in collaboration with Prof. Venkataraman’s ALIEN group in UMass Chemistry, studies how to leverage disorder in amorphous organic materials such as polymers to improve their thermoelectric performance. The paper is open access and free to read via Scientific Reports: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42265-z

Cameron’s research on the thermal boundary conductance between monolayers of 2-dimensional materials and 3D substrates has been published in IOP’s journal 2D Materials (link here: https://doi.org/10.1088/2053-1583/ab04bf ). In it, we show that the TBC is driven by the vibrational densities of states of the two materials and we identify trends in materials properties as well as the ideal substrate for each 2D layer. Amorphous substrates generally fare better than crystalline because of the so-called “boson peak” of excess low-frequency vibrational modes, which matches well with the flexural phonons in 2D materials.

In collaboration with the Salehi-Khojin group at UIC, we studied the effect of encapsulation on the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) between few-layer MXene (Ti₃C₂) and the substrate. Cameron’s first-principles simulations explain that encapsulating the MXene with amorphous AlOx nearly doubles the TBC to the substrate because the encapsulation dampens the long-wavelength flexural phonon modes that are responsible for most of the 2D-3D heat transfer. The work has been accepted for publication in the prestigious Advanced Materials (impact factor ~22): https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201801629

Our recent work on the dynamical thermal conductivity in graphene nanoribbons shows that frequency-dependent thermal transport arises in the hydrodynamic regime. Thermal conductivity resembles a low-pass filter while the normal and resistive components of the heat flux are out of phase with each other. The work is now published in Physical Review B: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.98.024303