An essential mechanism of heat dissipation in carbon nanotube electronics.

Excess heat generated in integrated circuits is one of the major problems of modern electronics. Surface phonon-polariton scattering is shown here to be the dominant mechanism for hot charge carrier energy dissipation in a nanotube device fabricated on a polar substrate, such as SiO(2). By use of microscopic quantum models, the Joule losses were calculated for the various energy dissipation channels as a function of the electric field, doping, and temperature. The polariton mechanism must be taken into account to obtain an accurate estimate of the effective thermal coupling of the nonsuspended nanotube to the substrate, which was found to be 0.1-0.2 W/(m x K) even in the absence of the bare phononic thermal coupling.