2018ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces

Record-Low and Anisotropic Thermal Conductivity of a Quasi-One-Dimensional Bulk ZrTe₅ Single Crystal

Jie Zhu, Tianli Feng, Scott Mills, Peipei Wang, Xuewang Wu, Liyuan Zhang, Sokrates T. Pantelides, Xu Du, Xiaojia Wang

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces · 10, 40740-40747 (2018)

**AI thematic illustration**Concept artwork created for this paper.

Introduction

Time-domain thermoreflectance measures heat transport along different axes of ZrTe₅. At room temperature its through-plane b-axis conductivity is about 0.33 W/(m·K), roughly one twelfth of the value along a.

A closer reading

The directional contrast within one compound shows why chemical composition alone cannot explain the low conductivity. Calculations connect the measured anisotropy to interlayer bonding and lattice anharmonicity, providing a mechanistic interpretation distinct from the measurement.