1 nm, dispersed in SiO2 [41], and a broad peak between 20 and

40 cm-1 was observed both in polarized and depolarized spectra, which could be attributed to a Boson peak, even though the authors did not explicitly name it as such. In addition, the Raman spectrum of porous silicon studied in [42] revealed a Boson peak at 150 cm-1. In a recent work, Claudio et al. [43] observed a Raman peak at 6 meV (approximately 50 cm-1) in doped polysilicon nanoparticles that were exposed to air and sintered to form nanocrystalline silicon. Their material had similar structure to that of our studied porous Si layer. They attributed the observed peak to a Boson peak. Brillouin spectroscopy is also a method to study the different phonon modes of a material. By applying it to porous Si with 80% porosity, Lockwood et al. [44] identified two acoustic phonon peaks exhibiting large peak widths. They attributed these peaks to the existence of fractons. However, Etomoxir ic50 in a more recent work of the same authors [45], the peak at 8 GHz was absent from their Brillouin spectra. The peak at 14 GHz observed by Lockwood was also observed by them, but it was attributed by the authors to the bulk transverse Rayleigh mode. In a recent paper by Polomska-Harlick and Andrews [46], a peak at approximately 8 GHz was observed in the Brillouin spectrum of porous Si with 59% porosity, similar to that observed by

Lockwood et al. [44]. Even though the authors characterized this peak as ‘unknown’, we think that it could be attributed to the existence Amylase of the phonon-to-fracton selleck chemicals crossover, suggested by Lockwood for porous Si and also observed in other disordered materials

[35]. Its intensity increased with sin θ and saturated at sin θ ~ 0.9 ⇒ θ ~ 65°. Based on the above two references, if we consider the Brillouin peak frequency at approximately 8 GHz as the crossover frequency, f co, a crossover temperature T co ~ 0.4 K is calculated. In amorphous materials, the high temperature limit of the plateau is at around 20 K. Above the plateau, a linear increase of the thermal conductivity with increasing temperature is observed. Alexander et al. [47] introduced the anharmonic interaction between fractons and phonons in order to explain this linear increase. While fractons do not carry heat, and as a SBI-0206965 concentration result their existence leads to a constant value of thermal conductivity with temperature, through the fracton-phonon interaction phonon-induced fracton hopping can contribute to the heat current, generating a thermal conductivity which increases linearly with increasing temperature. Our porous Si thermal conductivity results show a plateau in the temperature range 5 to 20 K, with a constant value of 0.04 W/m.K, and a monotonic increase of the thermal conductivity with temperature, at temperatures above 20 K. In the temperature range 30 to 100 K, we observed an almost linear temperature dependence of the thermal conductivity, as that discussed by Alexander et al.