Synthesis and diameter-dependent thermal conductivity of InAs nanowires

In this work, we synthesized high-quality InAs nanowires by a convenient chemical vapor deposition method, and developed a simple laser heating method to measure the thermal conductivity of a single InAs nanowire in air. During the measurement, a focused laser was used to heat one end of a freely suspended nanowire, with its other end embedded into a carbon conductive adhesive. In order to obtain the thermal conductivity of InAs nanowires, the heat loss in the heat transfer process was estimated, which includes the heat loss through air conduction, the heat convection, and the radiation loss. The absorption ratio of the laser power in the InAs nanowire was calculated. The result shows that the thermal conductivity of InAs nanowires monotonically increases from 6.4 W m^-1 K^-1 to 10.5 W m^-1 K^-1 with diameters increasing from 100 nm to 190 nm, which is ascribed to the enhanced phonon-boundary scattering.