Experimental observation of localized interfacial phonon modes

Interfaces impede heat flow in micro/nanostructured systems. Conventional theories for interfacial thermal transport were derived based on bulk phonon properties of the materials making up the interface without explicitly considering the atomistic interfacial details, which are found critical to correctly describing thermal boundary conductance. Recent theoretical studies predicted the existence of localized phonon modes at the interface which can play an important role in understanding interfacial thermal transport. However, experimental validation is still lacking. Through a combination of Raman spectroscopy and high-energy-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy in a scanning transmission electron microscope, we report the experimental observation of localized interfacial phonon modes at ~12 THz at a high-quality epitaxial Si-Ge interface. These modes are further confirmed using molecular dynamics simulations with a high-fidelity neural network interatomic potential, which also yield thermal boundary conductance agreeing well with that measured in time-domain thermoreflectance experiments. Simulations find that the interfacial phonon modes have an obvious contribution to the total thermal boundary conductance. Our findings significantly contribute to the understanding of interfacial thermal transport physics and have impact on engineering thermal boundary conductance at interfaces in applications such as electronics thermal management and thermoelectric energy conversion.

Confined Transducer Geometries to Enhance Sensitivity to Thermal Boundary Conductance in Frequency-Domain Thermoreflectance Measurements

Quantifying the resistance to heat flow across well-bonded, planar interfaces is critical in modern electronics packaging architectures, particularly as device length scales are reduced and power demands continue to grow unabated. However, very few experimental techniques are capable of measuring the thermal resistance across such interfaces due to limitations in the required measurement resolution provided by the characterization technique (i.e., Rth < 0.1 mm2·K/W in steady-state configurations) and restrictions on the thermal penetration depth that can be achieved as a result of the heating event that is typically imposed on a sample’s surface (for optical pump-probe thermoreflectance techniques). A recent numerical fitting routine for Frequency-domain Thermoreflectance (FDTR) developed by the authors1 offers a potential avenue to rectify these issues if the transducer’s geometry can be confined. This work utilizes numerical simulations to evaluate the sensitivity of FDTR to a range of thermal boundary resistance (TBR) values as a function of the thermal resistance of adjacent material layers. Experimental measurements are performed across a handful of different material systems to validate our computational results and to demonstrate the the extent to which confined transducer geometries can improve our sensitivyt to the TBR across so-called “buried” interfaces when characterized with FDTR.