The Thermal Conductivity of Nonmetallic Crystals

This chapter reviews the thermal conductivity of nonmetallic crystals at temperatures comparable to or higher than the Debye temperature. It deals with the intrinsic behavior of such pure crystals at high temperatures. In such crystals, the dominant carriers of thermal energy are phonons and the dominant scattering mechanism to be considered is the intrinsic phonon–phonon scattering. This is a small section of the much larger problem of the thermal conductivity of nonmetallic solids and clearly it neglects possible heat transport by photons, charge carriers, polarons, and magnons. It also neglects other possible phonon scattering mechanisms such as isotopes, impurities, vacancies, charge carriers, dislocations, grain boundaries, and crystal boundaries. It presents the absolute value of the thermal conductivity, K, as determined by phonon–phonon scattering, the temperature dependence of K, the volume dependence of K, the change in K upon melting, and the minimum value of K. The chapter discusses a composite curve for the thermal conductivity versus temperature of pure KCl measured at a constant pressure of, say, one atmosphere.