Thermal transport characterization of stanene/silicene heterobilayer and stanene bilayer nanostructures

Abstract Recently, stanene and silicene based nanostructures with low thermal conductivity have incited noteworthy interest due to their prospect in thermoelectrics. Aiming at the possibility of extracting lower thermal conductivity, in this study, we have proposed and modeled stanene/silicene heterobilayer nanoribbons, a new heterostructure and subsequently characterized their thermal transport by using an equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation. In addition, the thermal transport in bilayer stanene is also studied and compared. We have computed the thermal conductivity of the stanene/silicene and bilayer stanene nanostructures to characterize their thermal transport phenomena. The studied nanostructures show good thermal stability within the temperature range of 100–600 K. The room temperature thermal conductivities of pristine 10 nm × 3 nm stanene/silicene hetero-bilayer and stanene bilayer are estimated to be 3.63 ± 0.27 W m −1 K −1 and 1.31 ± 0.34 W m −1 K −1 , respectively, which are smaller than that of silicene, graphene and some other 2D monolayers as well as heterobilayers such as stanene/graphene and silicene/graphene. In the temperature range of 100–600 K, the thermal conductivity of our studied bilayer nanoribbons decreases with an increase in the temperature. Furthermore, we have investigated the dependence of our estimated thermal conductivity on the size of the considered nanoribbons. The thermal conductivities of both the nanoribbons are found to increase with an increase in the width of the structure. The thermal conductivity shows a similar increasing trend with the increase in the ribbon length, as well. Our results suggest that, the low thermal conductivity of our studied bilayer structures can be further decreased by nanostructuring. The significantly low thermal conductivity of the stanene/silicene heterobilayer and stanene bilayer nanoribbons realized in our study would provide a good insight and encouragement into their appealing prospect in the thermoelectric applications.