Thermal diffusivity of electrical insulators at high temperatures: Evidence for diffusion of bulk phonon-polaritons at infrared frequencies augmenting phonon heat conduction

We show that laser-flash analysis measurements of the temperature (T) dependence of thermal diffusivity (D) for diverse non-metallic (e.g., silicates) single-crystals is consistently represented by D(T) = FT^-G + HT above 298 K, with G ranging from 0.3 to 2, depending on structure, and H being ∼10^-4 K^-1 for 51 single-crystals, 3 polycrystals, and two glasses unaffected by disorder or reconstructive phase transitions. Materials exhibiting this behavior include complex silicates with variable amounts of cation disorder, perovskite structured materials, and graphite. The high-temperature term HT becomes important by ∼1300 K, above which temperature its contribution to D(T) exceeds that of the FT^-G term. The combination of the FT^-G and HT terms produces the nearly temperature independent high-temperature region of D previously interpreted as the minimal phonon mean free path being limited by the finite interatomic spacing. Based on the simplicity of the fit and large number of materials it represents, this finding has repercussions for high-temperature models of heat transport. One explanation is that the two terms describing D(T) are associated with two distinct microscopic mechanisms; here, we explore the possibility that the thermal diffusivity of an electrical insulator could include both a contribution of lattice phonons (the FT^-G term) and a contribution of diffusive bulk phonon-polaritons (BPP) at infrared (IR) frequencies (the HT term). The proposed BPP diffusion exists over length scales smaller than the laboratory sample sizes, and transfers mixed light and vibrational energy at a speed significantly smaller than the speed of light. Our diffusive IR-BPP hypothesis is consistent with other experimental observations such as polarization behavior, dependence of D on the number of IR peaks, and H = 0 for Ge and Si, which lack IR fundamentals. A simple quasi-particle thermal diffusion model is presented to begin understanding the contribution from bulk phonon-polaritons to overall heat conduction.