Thermal conductivity of 3C-SiC from configuration space sampling

Cubic silicon carbide phonon thermal conductivity has been calculated using anharmonic phonon analysis. The atomic interaction model was built using displacement-force data obtained with the High Efficiency Configuration Space Sampling (HECSS) technique and density functional theory calculated forces. In the new version of HECSS we replaced the Markov chain scheme of Metropolis-Hastings Monte-Carlo with weighting of the final sampling according to the target distribution. This increased the efficiency of the method and allowed to use – with appropriate weight – all generated and ab-initio evaluated samples. The quality of the proposed method is confirmed by the accuracy with which the experimental results taken from the literature were reproduced.