Heat transport across graphene/hexagonal-BN tilted grain boundaries from phase-field crystal model and molecular dynamics simulations

Abstract

We study the interfacial thermal conductance of grain boundaries (GBs) between monolayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) sheets using a combined atomistic approach. First, realistic samples containing graphene/h-BN GBs with different tilt angles are generated using the phase-field crystal (PFC) model developed recently [P. Hirvonen \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. B \textbf{100}, 165412 (2019)] that captures slow diffusive relaxation inaccessible to molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Then, large-scale MD simulations using the efficient GPUMD package are performed to assess heat transport and rectification properties across the GBs. We find that lattice mismatch between the graphene and h-BN sheets plays a less important role in determining the interfacial thermal conductance as compared to the tilt angle. In addition, we find no significant thermal rectification effects for these GBs.