| Summary: | Abstract Developing efficient strategy to regulate heat conduction is a challenging problem, with potential implication in the field of thermal materials. We here focus on a potential thermal material, i.e. complex networks of nanowires and nanotubes, and propose a model where the mass of each node is assigned proportional to its degree with $$m_i\sim k_i^{\alpha }$$ m i ∼ k i α , to investigate how distributed nodes masses can impact the heat flow in a network. We find that the heat conduction of complex network can be either increased or decreased, depending on the controlling parameter $$\alpha$$ α . Especially, there is an optimal heat conduction at $$\alpha =1$$ α = 1 and it is independent of network topologies. Moreover, we find that the temperature distribution within a complex network is also strongly influenced by the controlling parameter $$\alpha$$ α . A brief theoretical analysis is provided to explain these results. These findings may open up appealing applications in the cases of demanding either increasing or decreasing heat conduction, and our approach of regulating heat conduction by distributed nodes masses may be also valuable to the challenge of controlling waste heat dissipation in highly integrated and miniaturized modern devices.
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