Thermal conductivity of vanadium: Effect of disorder and inter-band scattering

We report a study on the thermal conductivity (κ) of two as-cast vanadium samples having different residual resistivity ratios (RRR). The sample having higher RRR shows a distinct peak near 38 K in the temperature (T) dependence of κ, whereas no such behavior is observed in the sample with smaller RRR. However, the κ of both the samples tend to saturate near the room temperature at about 30 W/m K, which is nearly one order less than that pure copper. We found that even for vanadium with a very high RRR (1524), the κ(300 K) is nearly same (34 W/m K) as that of the highly disordered samples. We found that while the κ at low T is strongly dependent on the amount of disorder present, we argue that the difference between the κ of vanadium and copper near room temperature is not due to the presence of disorder. Rather it is due to the intrinsic effects, such as s-d interband scattering, spin fluctuations etc., present in vanadium.