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An essential mechanism of heat dissipation in carbon nanotube electronics

Excess heat generated in integrated circuits is one of the major problems of modern electronics. Surface phonon-polariton scattering is shown here to be the dominant mechanism for hot charge carrier energy dissipation in a nanotube device fabricated on a polar substrate, such as $SiO_2$. Using microscopic quantum models the Joule losses were calculated for the various energy dissipation channels as a function of the electric field, doping, and temperature. The polariton mechanism must be taken into account to obtain an accurate estimate of the effective thermal coupling of the non-suspended nanotube to the substrate, which was found to be 0.1-0.2 W/m.K even in the absence of the bare phononic thermal coupling.