Thermal Conductivity of Vanadium: Effect of Disorder and Inter-band Scattering

We report a study on the thermal conductivity (kappa) of two as-cast vanadium samples having different residual resistivity ratios (RRR). The sample having higher RRR shows a distinct peak near 38 K in the temperature (T) dependence of kappa, whereas no such behavior is observed in the sample with smaller RRR. However, the kappa of both the samples tend to saturate near the room temperature at about 30 W/m K, which is nearly one order less than that pure copper. We found that even for vanadium with a very high RRR (1524), the kappa(300 K) is nearly same (34 W/m K) as that of the highly disordered samples. We found that while the kappa at low T is strongly dependent on the amount of disorder present, we argue that the difference between the kappa of vanadium and copper near room temperature is not due to the presence of disorder. Rather it is due to the intrinsic effects, such as s-d interband scattering, spin fluctuations etc., present in vanadium.