An alternative approach to efficient simulation of micro/nanoscale phonon transport

Abstract

Starting from the recently proposed energy-based deviational formulation for solving the Boltzmann equation [J.-P. Péraud and N. G. Hadjiconstantinou, Phys. Rev. B 84, 205331 (2011)], which provides significant computational speedup compared to standard Monte Carlo methods for small deviations from equilibrium, we show that additional computational benefits are possible in the limit that the governing equation can be linearized. The proposed method exploits the observation that under linearized conditions (small temperature differences) the trajectories of individual deviational particles can be decoupled and thus simulated independently; this leads to a particularly simple and efficient algorithm for simulating steady and transient problems in arbitrary three-dimensional geometries, without introducing any additional approximation.