Coherent control of thermal transport with pillar-based phononic crystals

Abstract Two-dimensional phononic crystals (PnCs) formed by a periodic array of holes in a suspended membrane have previously been used to coherently control thermal conductance at low temperatures by modifying the phonon dispersion, thereby altering the phonon group velocities and the density of states. Here, in contrast, we demonstrate that PnCs formed by a periodic array of aluminium pillars on an uncut silicon nitride membrane can also be used to achieve similar coherent control. We have measured and simulated the thermal conductance of four pillar-based PnCs with different lattice constants ranging from 0.3 to 5 μm at sub-Kelvin temperatures, showing a strong up to an order of magnitude reduction in thermal conductance compared to an unaltered membrane. For the larger lattice constants > 1 μm, however, the experiments do not agree with the coherent theory simulations, which we interpret as a breakdown of coherence induced by increasingly effective diffusive scattering due to the roughness of the aluminium pillar surfaces.