Thermal Management in Silicene Nanosheets With Designed Cavities by Molecular Dynamic Simulations

Silicene, the silicon-based two-dimensional structure with honeycomb lattice, has been discovered to have tremendous application potential in fundamental industries. However, the thermal transport mechanism and thermal properties of silicene has not been fully explained. We report a possible way to control the thermal transport and thermal rectification in silicene nanosheets by designing distributions of a series of triangular cavities in this paper with the nonequilibrium molecular dynamic simulations. The cavities are arranged in a staggered way. The reflection of phonon at the vertex and the base of the triangular cavities are quite different. This difference is used to control the phonon transport in opposite directions and such an arrangement is expected to have very significant thermal rectification effect. The size of cavities, the distance between the triangular cavities and the distribution of cavities are investigated to observe the thermal rectification, which would benefit the design of an experiment that can clearly demonstrate thermal rectification.