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).
Related pages
- Boron Arsenide (BAs)
- Ultrahigh Thermal Conductivity in Boron Arsenide
- Four-Phonon Scattering
- Boston College
Source notes & attribution
- https://rexresearch.com/BoronArsenide/BoronArsenide.html