{
  "id": "1510.00706",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2015-10-02T19:55:40.000Z",
  "updated": "2015-10-02T19:55:40.000Z",
  "title": "Importance of Four-Phonon Scattering at High Temperatures or for Strongly Anharmonic Materials",
  "authors": [
    "Tianli Feng",
    "Xiulin Ruan"
  ],
  "categories": [
    "cond-mat.mes-hall",
    "cond-mat.mtrl-sci"
  ],
  "abstract": "Despite its great success, the recent first principle-based prediction of lattice thermal conductivity $\\kappa$ typically only includes three-phonon scattering due to the challenge of evaluating the scattering rates of higher-order processes, and hence its accuracy is limited to relatively low temperatures. In this work, however, we have developed a formalism to explicitly determine quantum mechanical scattering probability matrices for the full Brillouin Zone, and by mitigating the computational cost we have directly calculated four-phonon scattering rates. We find that four-phonon scattering rates are comparable to three-phonon scattering rates at medium and high temperatures, and they increase quadratically with temperature. As a consequence, $\\kappa$ of Lennard-Jones argon is reduced by more than 60\\% at 80 K when four-phonon scattering is included. Also, in less anharmonic materials -- diamond, silicon, and germanium, $\\kappa$ is still reduced considerably at high temperature.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2015-10-02T19:55:40.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "high temperature",
      "strongly anharmonic materials",
      "mechanical scattering probability matrices",
      "quantum mechanical scattering probability",
      "calculated four-phonon scattering rates"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 0,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable"
    }
  }
}