Natalio
Mingo
Staff
Scientist, principal investigator Natalio
Mingo's research centers on theoretically understanding and computing the
thermal and thermoelectric conduction properties of nanoscale materials. A thorough understanding of nanoscale transport is key to
the development of new thermoelectric materials for power generation and
cooling technologies, and also to solving the problem of heat management
in micro/nano-electronics. Mingo is presently
working on novel approaches to better predict material conduction
properties starting from their basic composition and structure.
Mingo
and coworkers have developed new methods to compute the thermal transport
properties of nanoscale materials -including
semiconductor nanowires, nanobelts, carbon nanotubes,
nanoporous materials, and molecular junctions-
and also bulk materials and interfaces. In many of these cases, the
description is quantum mechanical, and atomistic, thus adding important
information unavailable from other techniques like classical molecular
dynamics or continuum descriptions. These new methods have already allowed
to predict the thermal conductivities of various
nanomaterials in wide temperature ranges and
conditions, in good agreement with experiments. Work
is also ongoing to simultaneously compute and experimentally characterize
the thermoelectric properties of nanocomposites
and nanowire based materials, in collaboration
with several groups at LITEN, NASA-Ames and outside. These efforts are aimed at
the development of technologically relevant adaptive materials with taylorable conduction properties, for applications in
the aerospace and energy fields.
Selected
Publications: ·
N.
Mingo, "Anharmonic phonon transport through
molecular-sized junctions", Phys. Rev. B, 74, 125402
(2006). ·
·
N.
Mingo and D. A. Broido, "Length dependence of
carbon nanotube thermal conductivity, and the
problem of long waves”, Nano Letters 5,
1221 (2005). ·
N.
Mingo and D. A. Broido, Lattice thermal
conductivity crossovers in semiconductor nanowires. Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 246106 (2004). ·
N.
Mingo, Calculation of Si nanowire thermal
conductivity using complete phonon dispersion relations. Phys. Rev.
B 68, 113308 (2003). ·
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