title: Interfacial thermal resistance and thermal rectification in carbon nanotube film-copper systems.
abstract: Thermal rectification occurring at interfaces is an important research area, which contains deep fundamental physics and has extensive application prospects. In general, the measurement of interfacial thermal rectification is based on measuring interfacial thermal resistance (ITR). However, ITRs measured via conventional methods cannot avoid extra thermal resistance asymmetry due to the contact between the sample and the thermometer. In this study, we employed a non-contact infrared thermal imager to monitor the temperature of super-aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) films and obtain the ITRs between the CNT films and copper. The ITRs along the CNT-copper direction and the reverse direction are in the ranges of 2.2-3.6 cm2K W-1and 9.6-11.9 cm2K W-1, respectively. The obvious difference in the ITRs of the two directions shows a significant thermal rectification effect, and the rectifying coefficient ranges between 0.57 and 0.68. The remarkable rectification factor is extremely promising for the manufacture of thermal transistors with a copper/CNT/copper structure and further thermal logic devices. Moreover, our method could be extended to other 2-dimensional materials, such as graphene and MoS2, for further explorations.
authors.affiliation: Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. chliu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zheng
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2683-9926
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Duan
authors.affiliation: Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. chliu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Danyang
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Energy Conversion Research Center, Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology, China Academy of Space Technology, Beijing 100094, China.
authors.forename: Guang
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1914-4904
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. chliu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Qingwei
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. chliu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Changhong
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8041-9455
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Tsinghua-Foxconn Nanotechnology Research Center and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. chliu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Shoushan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fan