Thermal conductivity of binary, ternary, and quaternary III-V compounds

The room-temperature thermal conductivity of III-V compounds is analyzed. The phenomenological approach of Abeles is applied to take into account disordered structure of ternary and quaternary alloys. The procedure is used for the In1−xGaxAsyP1−y quaternary alloy. The approximate analytical expression for this case is derived. A more exact method of the calculations is also proposed. It enables presenting the thermal conductivity and the thermal diffusivity for both the InP lattice-matched and GaAs lattice-matched In1−xGaxAsyP1−y alloys as a function of their composition.