Thermal resistances of crystalline and amorphous few-layer oxide thin films

Thermal insulation at nanoscale is of crucial importance for non-volatile memory devices such as phase change memory and memristors. We perform non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to study the effects of interface materials and structures on thermal transport across the few-layer dielectric nanostructures. The thermal resistance across few-layer nanostructures and thermal boundary resistance at interfaces consisting of SiO₂/HfO₂, SiO₂/ZrO₂ or SiO₂/Al₂O₃ are obtained for both the crystalline and amorphous structures. Based on the comparison temperature profiles and phonon density of states, we show that the thermal boundary resistances are much larger in crystalline few-layer oxides than the amorphous ones due to the mismatch of phonon density of state between distinct oxide layers. Compared with the bulk SiO₂, the increase of thermal resistance across crystalline few-layer oxides results from the thermal boundary resistance while the increase of thermal resistance across amorphous few-layer oxides is attributed to the lower thermal conductivity of the amorphous thin films.