Scientists develop new method of dissipating heat in electronics

The international team led by a researcher at the University of California, Riverside has modified the energy spectrum of acoustic phonons - elemental excitations that spread heat through crystalline materials like a wave - by confining them to nanometre-scale semiconductor structures. According to UC Riverside, the results have important implications in the thermal management of electronic devices.

Led by Alexander Balandin, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computing Engineering and UC Presidential Chair Professor in UCR's Bourns College of Engineering, the research is described in Nature Communications.

The team is said to have used semiconductor nanowires from Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), synthesised by researchers in Finland, and an imaging technique called Brillouin-Mandelstam light scattering spectroscopy (BMS) to study the movement of phonons through the crystalline nanostructures.

By changing the size and the shape of the GaAs nanostructures, the researchers were able to alter the energy spectrum, or dispersion, of acoustic phonons. The BMS instrument used for this study was built at UCR's Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials (POEM) Center, which is directed by Balandin.