Distributions of phonon lifetimes in Brillouin zones

A collaboration of researchers from Japan and France present a comprehensive study of phonon lifetimes and thermal conductivity for 33 zincblende- and wurtzite compounds using linearized phonon Boltzmann equation and first-principles anharmonic phonon calculations. The software that the authors created for this study will be released as an open source package and should be of help in the search of new materials for thermoelectric applications.