Reducing the thermal conductivity of carbon nanotubes below the random isotope limit

Abstract

We find that introducing segmented isotopic disorder patterns may considerably reduce the thermal conductivity of pristine carbon nanotubes below the uncorrelated disorder value. This is a result of the interplay between different length scales in the phonon scattering process. We use ab-initio atomistic Green's function calculations to quantify the effect of various types of segmentation similar to that experimentally produced by coalescence of isotope-engineered fullerenes.