Thermal conductivity of silicon doped by phosphorus: ab initio study

An original approach to the theoretical calculations of the heat conductivity of crystals based on the first principles molecular dynamics has been proposed. The proposed approach exploits the kinetic theory of phonon heat conductivity and permits calculating several material properties at certain temperature: specific heat, elastic constant, acoustic velocity, mean phonon scattering time and coefficient of thermal conductivity. The method has been applied to silicon and phosphorus doped silicon crystals and the obtained results have been found to be in satisfactory agreement with corresponding experimental data. The proposed computation technique may be applied to the calculations of heat conductivity of pure and doped semiconductors and isolators.