Phonon scattering refers to the process by which phonons, which are quantized modes of vibrations occurring in a material (often modeled as sound waves or thermal vibrations), interact with impurities, defects, or other phonons in a solid. It plays a crucial role in determining the thermal and electrical properties of materials, especially in solids.
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Phonon scattering changes the occupation or propagation of lattice-vibration normal modes through interactions with boundaries, defects or other phonons. Anharmonic terms permit phonon-phonon scattering. Different processes need not relax heat flow equally: normal processes conserve total crystal momentum within the first Brillouin zone, whereas Umklapp scattering changes its representative by a nonzero reciprocal lattice vector.