First-principles Calculations of the Phonon Transport in Carbon Atomic Chains Based on Atomistic Green's Function Formalism

Thermal transport in nanomaterials is not only scientifically interesting but also technological important for various future electronic, bio, and energy device applications. Among the various computation approaches to investigate lattice thermal transport phenomena in nanoscale, the atomistic nonequilibrium Green's function approach based on first-principles density functional theory calculations appeared as a promising method given the continued miniaturization of devices and the difficulty of developing classical force constants for novel nanoscale interfaces. Among the nanometerials, carbon atomic chains, namely the cumulene (all-doulble bonds, ${\cdots}C=C=C=C{\cdots}$) and polyyne (alternation of single and triple bonds, ${\cdots}C{\equiv}C-C{\equiv}C{\cdots}$) can be considered as the extream cases of interconnction materials for nanodevices. After the discovery and realization of carbon atomic chains, their electronic transport properties have been widely studied. For the thermal transport properties, however, there have been few literatures for this simple linear chain system. In this work, we first report on the development of a non-equilibrium Green's function theory-based computational tool for atomistic thermal transport calculations of nanojunctions. Using the developed tool, we investigated phonon dispersion and transmission properties of polyethylene (${\cdots}CH2-CH2-CH2-CH2{\cdots}$) and polyene (${\cdots}CH-CH-CH-CH{\cdots}$) structures as well as the cumulene and polyyne. The resulting phonon dispersion from polyethylene and polyene showed agreement with previous results. Compared to the cumulene, the gap was found near the ${\Gamma}$ point of the phonon dispersion of polyyne as the prediction of Peierls distortion, and this feature was reflected in the phonon transmission of polyyne. We also investigated the range of interatomic force interactions with increase in the size of the simulation system to check the convergence criteria. Compared to polyethylene and polyene, polyyne and cumulene showed spatially long-ranged force interactions. This is reflected on the differences in phonon transport caused by the delicate differences in electronic structure.