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Research Highlight

Breaking Rayleigh’s Law Suppresses Thermal Conductivity

Published:

Scientific Achievement: Theoretical calculations demonstrated that spatially correlated disorder breaks Rayleigh’s law for phonon scattering, yielding an order of magnitude reduction of thermal conductivity.

Significance and Impact: This result provides a new paradigm for minimizing thermal conductivity with crucial relevance to energy applications such as thermal insulation, energy storage, and thermoelectrics.

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.026301