Thermal conductivity of zinc blende and wurtzite CdSe nanostructures

Many binary octet compounds including CdSe can be grown in either the wurtzite (WZ) or zinc blende (ZB) phase, which has aroused great interest among the research community in understanding the phase dependence of the thermal transport properties of these compounds. So far, it has been debatable whether the ZB phase possesses higher thermal conductivity than the WZ phase. In this work, we report on thermal conductivity measurements of CdSe nanowires/nanoribbons with both WZ and ZB phases via a suspended device method. At room temperature, the thermal conductivity of all the ZB CdSe nanostructures measured in this work is higher than the bulk thermal conductivity of the WZ CdSe reported in the literature, suggesting that the bulk thermal conductivity of the ZB CdSe is higher than that of the WZ phase. Our result is different from previous experimental results in the literature for InAs nanowires which suggest similar thermal conductivity values for the bulk ZB and WZ InAs crystals. The higher thermal conductivity of the ZB CdSe can be explained by its lower anharmonicity and a smaller number of atoms per unit cell compared to the WZ phase.