ABSTRACT

There has been increasing interest in thermal properties of materials in the scienti•c and industrial research communities in recent years. This has been mostly motivated by the heat removal and thermal management issues in the electronic industry and also by the need to understand heat conduction at nanoscale from a fundamental science perspective [1-3]. A material’s ability to conduct heat is ingrained in its atomic structure and knowledge of thermal conductivity can shed light on many other materials’ properties. Thermal transport in two-dimensional (2-D) and one-dimensional (1-D) systems presents a particularly interesting scienti•c problem. Materials with very high or very low thermal conductivities attract attention due to possible applications for either heat removal or thermal insulation.