Low-temperature anharmonicity in cesium chloride (CsCl)

Anharmonic lattice vibrations govern heat transfer in materials, and anharmonicity is commonly assumed to be dominant at high temperature. The textbook cubic ionic defect-free crystal CsCl is shown to have an unexplained low thermal conductivity at room temperature (ca. 1 W/(m K)), which increases to around 13 W/(m K) at 25 K. Through high-resolution X-ray diffraction it is unexpectedly shown that the Cs atomic displacement parameter becomes anharmonic at 20 K. (copyright 2017 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH and Co. KGaA, Weinheim)