| Abstract Scope |
Interfacial thermal resistance is a critical bottleneck in nanoscale thermal management, yet its origins remain incompletely understood. Conventional frameworks treat it as a purely local phenomenon arising from phonon scattering at the interface. In this talk, we first demonstrate that a substantial, previously underappreciated contribution originates from the non-equilibrium phonon distribution induced by interface scattering. By solving the Peierls-Boltzmann transport equation (PBE) via Monte Carlo methods across a broad range of heterojunctions—including group IV and III-V insulators, metals, and alloys—we show that this non-equilibrium resistance is at minimum comparable to, and often exceeds, the direct scattering resistance, scaling linearly with the Debye temperature ratio of the paired materials. In the second part, we present a quantum-inspired tensor network approach for solving the PBE that achieves an order-of-magnitude reduction in CPU time and three orders-of-magnitude reduction in memory, demonstrating significant promise for multi-dimensional thermal transport simulations. |