The authors discuss a generalized transport model including memory and nonlocal effects, which aims to describe the transition of heat transport from the diffusive regime to the ballistic regime. By using an effective thermal conductivity depending on the Knudsen number, they describe in a single equation the behavior of conductivity in terms of the system size and a reduction in the limit flux through nanoscale devices.

We use phonon hydrodynamics with a surface slip flow as a simplified macroscopic model accounting for a reduction in lateral thermal conductivity in nanosystems. For high Knudsen numbers, the corresponding effective thermal conductivity decreases linearly with the radius or the width, in contrast with the quadratic dependence predicted by usual phonon hydrodynamics. The linear dependence is accounted for by the surface slip flow. The difference in the expressions for the surface tangential flow in the hydrodynamic and the diffusive regimes is commented on and the influence of boundary conditions on the form of the effective thermal conductivity is explored.

Phonon hydrodynamics is used to analyze the influence of porosity and of pore size on reduction in thermal conductivity in porous silicon, with respect to crystalline silicon. The expressions predict that the thermal conductivity is lower for higher porosity and for smaller pore radius, as a consequence of phonon ballistic effects. The theoretical results describe experimental data better than the assumption that they only depend on porosity.

Understanding nanoscale thermal transport is of substantial importance for designing contemporary semiconductor technologies. Heat removal from small sources is well established to be severely impeded compared to diffusive predictions due to the ballistic nature of the dominant heat carriers. Experimental observations are commonly interpreted through a reduction of effective thermal conductivity, even though most measurements only probe a single aggregate thermal metric. Here, we employ thermoreflectance thermal imaging to directly visualise the 2D temperature field produced by localised heat sources on InGaAs with characteristic widths down to 100 nm. Besides displaying effective thermal performance reductions up to 50% at the active junctions in agreement with prior studies, our steady-state thermal images reveal that, remarkably, 1–3 μm adjacent to submicron devices the crosstalk is actually reduced by up to fourfold. Submicrosecond transient imaging additionally shows responses to be faster than conventionally predicted. A possible explanation based on hydrodynamic heat transport, and some open questions, are discussed.

Wave-like heat propagation is shown to emerge as a consequence of a rapidly varying temperature field in Ge.

We present a model which deepens into the role that normal scattering has on the thermal conductivity in semiconductor bulk, micro, and nanoscale samples. Thermal conductivity as a function of the temperature undergoes a smooth transition from a kinetic to a collective regime that depends on the importance of normal scattering events. We demonstrate that in this transition, the key point to fit experimental data is changing the way to perform the average on the scattering rates. We apply the model to bulk Si with different isotopic compositions obtaining an accurate fit. Then we calculate the thermal conductivity of Si thin films and nanowires by only introducing the effective size as additional parameter. The model provides a better prediction of the thermal conductivity behavior valid for all temperatures and sizes above 30 nm with a single expression. Avoiding the introduction of confinement or quantum effects, the model permits to establish the limit of classical theories in the study of the thermal conductivity in nanoscopic systems.