Disparate Strain Dependent Thermal Conductivity of Two-dimensional Penta-Structures

Two-dimensional (2D) carbon allotrope called penta-graphene was recently proposed from first-principles calculations and various similar penta-structures emerged. Despite significant effort having been dedicated to electronic structures and mechanical properties, little research has been focused on thermal transport in penta-structures. Motivated by this, we performed a comparative study of thermal transport properties of three representative pentagonal structures, namely penta-graphene, penta-SiC2, and penta-SiN2, by solving the phonon Boltzmann transport equation with interatomic force constants extracted from first-principles calculations. Unexpectedly, the thermal conductivity of the three penta-structures exhibits diverse strain dependence, despite their very similar geometry structures. While the thermal conductivity of penta-graphene exhibits standard monotonic reduction by stretching, penta-SiC2 possesses an unusual nonmonotonic up-and-down behavior. More interestingly, the thermal conductivity of penta-SiN2 has 1 order of magnitude enhancement due to the strain induced buckled to planar structure transition. The mechanism governing the diverse strain dependence is identified as the competition between the change of phonon group velocity and phonon lifetime of acoustic phonon modes with combined effect from the unique structure transition for penta-SiN2. The disparate thermal transport behavior is further correlated to the fundamentally different bonding nature in the atomic structures with solid evidence from the distribution of deformation charge density and more in-depth molecular orbital analysis. The reported giant and robust tunability of thermal conductivity may inspire intensive research on other derivatives of penta-structures as potential materials for emerging nanoelectronic devices. The fundamental physics understood from this study also solidifies the strategy to engineer thermal transport properties of broad 2D materials by simple mechanical strain.