Layer thickness-dependent phonon properties and thermal conductivity of MoS2

For conventional materials, the thermal conductivity of thin films is usually suppressed when the thickness decreases due to phonon-boundary scattering. However, this is not necessarily true for the van der Waals solids if the thickness is reduced to only a few layers. In this letter, the layer thickness-dependent phonon properties and thermal conductivity in the few-layer MoS2 are studied using the first-principles-based Peierls-Boltzmann transport equation approach. The basal-plane thermal conductivity of 10-μm-long samples is found to monotonically reduce from 138 W/mK to 98 W/mK for naturally occurring MoS2, and from 155 W/mK to 115 W/mK for isotopically pure MoS2, when its thickness increases from one layer to three layers. The thermal conductivity of tri-layer MoS2 approaches to that of bulk MoS2. Both the change of phonon dispersion and the thickness-induced anharmonicity are important for explaining such a thermal conductivity reduction. The increased anharmonicity in bi-layer MoS2 results in stronger phonon scattering for ZA i modes, which is linked to the breakdown of the symmetry in single-layer MoS2.