Ballistic to diffusive crossover of heat flow in graphene ribbons

Heat flow in nanomaterials is an important area of study, with both fundamental and technological implications. However, little is known about heat flow in two-dimensional devices or interconnects with dimensions comparable to the phonon mean free path. Here we find that short, quarter-micron graphene samples reach ~35% of the ballistic thermal conductance limit up to room temperature, enabled by the relatively large phonon mean free path (~100 nm) in substrate-supported graphene. In contrast, patterning similar samples into nanoribbons leads to a diffusive heat-flow regime that is controlled by ribbon width and edge disorder. In the edge-controlled regime, the graphene nanoribbon thermal conductivity scales with width approximately as ~W1.80.3, being about 100 W m−1 K−1 in 65-nm-wide graphene nanoribbons, at room temperature. These results show how manipulation oftwo-dimensional device dimensions and edges can be used to achieve full control of their heat-carrying properties, approaching fundamentally limited upper or lower bounds.