Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Thermal Conductivity of Germanene Nanoribbons (GeNR) with Armchair and Zigzag Chirality

Germanene, an allotrope of germanium which is a two dimensional material with sp2 hybridization, has almost the same properties with graphene except for its buckled structure. In this study, germanium nanoribbon (GeNR) is use for it is still a new material for nanoscale level of research. In this paper, we investigate the effect of chirality on the thermal conductivity of zigzag GeNR (ZGeNR) and armchair GeNR (AGeNR) chiralities using equilibrium molecular dynamics with varied lengths at fixed temperature and varied temperatures at fixed length. The simulations were carried out in Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) using Tersoff potential for the Ge-Ge interactions. The thermal conductivity is calculated using Green-Kubo method. It is found that the chirality can affect the thermal conductivity of GeNR. Our results show that thermal conductivity of AGeNR is higher than ZGeNR in both increasing temperatures and lengths similar to the thermal conductivity behavior obtained in silicene nanoribbons [Int. J. Mech. Mater. Des. 9 (2013) 105].