Jivtesh Garg
University of Oklahoma, OK·Engineering
Electronics such as laptops, phones and high-power gallium nitride (GaN) transistors produce more heat as they become more powerful. If that heat is not removed, devices become hot enough to fail.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
thermal management
interfacial thermal conductance
thermal boundary resistance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether evanescent electric fields across 2–4 Å interfacial gaps help acoustic phonons, the lattice vibrations that carry heat, cross GaN–diamond interfaces, using atomistic Green's function calculations.
- Quantify how Coulomb-interaction-assisted phonon transmission raises interfacial thermal conductance, using classical and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of defected device–substrate interfaces.
- Identify materials with higher thermal conductivity than diamond at nanometer-to-micron length scales, using first-principles three- and four-phonon scattering calculations and an exact solution of the Boltzmann transport equation.
More about the research
Diamond conducts heat extremely well, at more than 2000 W/mK at room temperature, so it makes an attractive base layer for spreading heat away from devices. However, the junction between GaN and diamond has weak bonding and structural defects. These flaws block much of the heat flow and weaken the benefit of using diamond. This project asks whether electric fields across that interface can help heat cross it.
Why it matters
Overheating limits the reliability and performance of high-power gallium nitride devices used in power and radio-frequency electronics. Lowering the thermal resistance at the GaN–diamond junction, and finding materials that conduct heat even better than diamond, could lead to cooler and more reliable next-generation devices for chip and device makers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
Asegun Henry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Engineering
Advance understanding of phonon transport, the atomic vibrations that carry heat, in disordered materials whose atoms lack a regular repeating arrangement, using advanced computational approaches.
Yan Wang
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how wave-like phonons, atomic vibrations that carry heat, travel, scatter and become trapped in periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic structures, combining spectral phonon analysis with phonon spectroscopy.
The school
University of Oklahoma: 11 labs on PI Pages, $474M a year on research, 225 research doctorates a year.
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