"We saw evidence for what Einstein first proposed in 1911that heat energy hops randomly from atom to atom in thermal insulators," said Lucas Lindsay, materials theorist at ORNL. "The hopping is in addition to the normal heat flow through the collective vibration of atoms."
Additional coauthors of the paper titled, "Two-channel model for ultralow thermal conductivity of crystalline Tl3VSe4," included ORNL's David S. Parker, Brian C. Sales, Alexander A. Puretzky, Michael A. McGuire and Lucas Lindsay.