  By interlayer sliding in van der Waals (vdW) materials, the switching
electric polarization of ultrathin ferroelectric materials leads to the widely
studied slidetronics. In this work, we report that such sliding can further
tailor anharmonic effects and hence thermal transport properties due to the
changed intrinsic coupling between atomic layers. And we propose an
unprecedented concept dubbed as slidephononics, where the phonons and
associated physical properties can be controlled by varying the intrinsic
stacking configurations of slidetronic vdW materials. Based on the
state-of-the-art first-principles calculations, it is demonstrated that the
thermal conductivity of boron nitride (BN) bilayers can be significantly
modulated (by up to four times) along the sliding pathways. Detailed analysis
reveals that the variation of thermal conductivities can be attributed to the
tunable (de-)coupling of the out-of-plane acoustic phonon branches with the
other phonon modes, which is induced by the interlayer charge transfer. Such
strongly modulated thermal conductivity via interlayer sliding in vdW materials
paves the way to engineer thermal management materials in emerging vdW
electronic devices, which would shed light on future studies of slidephononics.
