Chirality and thickness-dependent thermal conductivity of few-layer graphene: A molecular dynamics study

The thermal conductivity of graphene nanoribbons (layer from 1 to 8 atomic planes) is investigated by using the nonequilibrium molecular dynamics method. We present that the room-temperature thermal conductivity decays monotonically with the number of the layers in few-layer graphene. The superiority of zigzag graphene in thermal conductivity is only available in high temperature region and disappears in multi-layer case. It is explained that the phonon spectral shrink in high frequency induces the change of thermal conductivity. It is also reported that single-layer graphene has better ballistic transport property than the multi-layer graphene.