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Cabinet/Boron arsenide

Research article / 1 minute read

David Broido

David Broido is a professor of physics at Boston College and a co-author of the 2013 first-principles prediction that cubic boron arsenide would have unusually high thermal conductivity.

The phys.org item reproduced in the dossier quotes Broido explaining that diamond's high thermal conductivity is well understood — it results from the lightness of carbon atoms and the stiffness of the bonds between them — whereas boron arsenide "was not expected to be a particularly good thermal conductor" and had been estimated, using conventional criteria, to have a thermal conductivity 10 times smaller than diamond. Broido states that the team used a recently developed theoretical approach for calculating thermal conductivities, previously tested on many well-studied materials, and that they were surprised to find an unusual interplay of vibrational properties in BAs lying outside the usual guidelines.

His co-authors on the 2013 work were Tom Reinecke (Naval Research Laboratory) and Lucas Lindsay (then an NRL postdoc with a Boston College doctorate).

In 2020 Broido and Navaneetha K. Ravichandran posted a first-principles study of seventeen zinc blende semiconductors. It reports that four-phonon scattering is exceptionally weak in compounds containing boron, carbon or nitrogen: Why Boron, Carbon and Nitrogen Compounds Escape Four-Phonon Scattering: A First-Principles Survey of Seventeen Zinc Blende Crystals (Ravichandran and Broido, 2020).

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Source notes & attribution
  1. https://rexresearch.com/BoronArsenide/BoronArsenide.html
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Strong Temperature Dependence of Thermal Conductivity in High-Purity Cubic Boron Arsenide

This paper (arXiv 2402.00248) by Songrui Hou, Fengjiao Pan and twelve co-authors reports cubic Boron Arsenide (BAs) crystals that conduct heat better than any previously measured, and then asks a sharper question than "how high?": how fast does that conductivity fall as the crystal warms up? The answer, a fall proportional to 1/

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Why Boron, Carbon and Nitrogen Compounds Escape Four-Phonon Scattering: A First-Principles Survey of Seventeen Zinc Blende Crystals (Ravichandran and Broido, 2020)

The dossier's account of Boron Arsenide (BAs) has one awkward step. Theory first predicted a room-temperature thermal conductivity far above what was measured. The gap was then closed by adding Four-Phonon Scattering , a higher-order process that most calculations had left out. That raises an obvious question. If four-phonon sca

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Boston College

Boston College is a research university whose physics department produced the 2013 first-principles prediction of ultrahigh thermal conductivity in cubic boron arsenide, reported in the source dossier. David Broido is a professor of physics there and a co-author of the prediction.