Thermal transport in amorphous carbon nanotubes

Thermal transport in low-dimensional materials is of great fundamental and applied interest due to their unusual and widely tunable properties, as demonstrated by numerous studies of two- and one-dimensional (1D) crystals. In grim contrast, low-dimensional amorphous materials remain largely unexplored, despite their potentially unique characteristics and applications. Here, we theoretically explore thermal transport in quasi-1D single-walled amorphous carbon nanotubes (a-CNTs) by combining homogeneous nonequilibrium molecular dynamics and lattice dynamics, based on a custom-trained high-accuracy machine-learned potential. For both zigzag and armchair a-CNTs of different diameters, the quantum-corrected thermal conductivity (κ) consistently drops by about an order of magnitude as the degree of disorder increases from 0.01 to 0.08, which is quantified by the concentration of Stone-Wales defects. Spectral analysis reveals the predominant role of the low-frequency (κ suppression appears to be dictated by the structural disorder while anharmonicity barely contributes. Our work expands the understanding of thermal transport in low-dimensional amorphous materials and may help promote their eventual application.