Interfacial heat transport in 2D heterostructures as a designable degree of freedom. (IMAGE)
Caption
2D heterointerfaces can be formed as vertically stacked van der Waals interfaces or laterally stitched in-plane junctions. Their thermal behavior is determined by a sequence of linked processes. Interface formation through direct growth or transfer assembly defines the initial structure and quality of the boundary. Thermal metrology, including optical, electrical and mapping-based approaches, enables interfacial heat transport to be quantified. Microscopic mechanisms such as elastic transmission, inelastic scattering and interface-specific phonon modes govern how vibrational energy crosses or is redistributed at the interface. These mechanisms can be modified through intrinsic and external tuning strategies, including interface geometry, strain, twist and intercalation. When such tunability is connected to device operation, 2D heterointerfaces can move beyond passive heat dissipation toward thermal functionality, including rectification, switching and transistor-like heat-flow control. 2D: two-dimensional; TDTR: time-domain thermoreflectance.
Credit
© Xing Zhang, et al. 2026. This is an Open Access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, for any purpose, even commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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CC BY