Ballistic thermal transport in monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides: Role of atomic mass

We investigate the ballistic thermal transport of monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), which is crucial for the thermal management of their potential applications in nanoelectronics. We find the thermal conductance is mainly affected by the atomic masses of TMDs. As a consequence, the temperature dependences of thermal conductances of different TMDs cross: At low temperatures below ∼50 K, the thermal conductance increases with the atomic mass, while it exhibits the opposite trend at high temperatures. The crossing behavior of temperature dependent thermal conductance is characteristic of the atomic mass effect, and TMDs provide a model system demonstrating that the thermal conductance can be effectively manipulated via the atomic mass by selecting appropriate atom. In addition, we clarify that in any two dimensional system such as monolayer TMDs and graphene, due to quadratic dispersion of the out-of-plane modes, the thermal conductance and specific heat in the low temperature limit are proportional to T3∕2 and T, respectively. Mainly because of much smaller group velocities of in-plane acoustic phonons, the high temperature thermal conductances of monolayer TMDs are much smaller than graphene. However, due to comparable group velocities of out-of-plane acoustic phonons, below 100 K thermal conductances of monolayer TMDs are rather comparable to graphene if taking the same layer thickness for comparison.