Temporal Coherence in Heat Conduction
Coherence of thermal excitations is a long-standing and general problem in physics. Theconventional theory of the phonon gas model indeed does not include coherence and its impact onthermal transport We propose a general heat conduction formalism based on theoreticalarguments and direct atomic simulations, which bridges conventional phonon gas model and thewave picture of thermal phonons By naturally introducing wavepackets in the fundamental heatflux expression, we derive an original ther mal conductivity formula where coherence times andlife-times appear. We apply the theory to a complex crystal where interatomic potentials areoptimized by a Machine Leaming procedure. The simulation reveals an intrinsic and a -previouslinvestigated- mutual coherence appearing in two different temperature ranges.