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High throughput nanoimaging of thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal conductance

Published

Author(s)

Mingkang Wang, Georg Ramer, Diego Perez, Georges Pavlidis, Jeffrey Schwartz, Liya Yu, Robert Ilic, Vladimir Aksyuk, Andrea Centrone

Abstract

Thermal properties of materials are often determined by measuring thermalization processes. Measuring such properties at the nanoscale, however, requires high sensitivity, high temporal, and high spatial resolutions concurrently, which is beyond the current state of the art. Here, we develop an optomechanical cantilever probe and customize an atomic force microscope (AFM) to measure sample thermalization dynamics with ≈ 10 ns temporal resolution, ≈ 35 nm spatial resolution, and high sensitivity thanks to a very low detection noise ≈ 1 fm/Hz1/2 over a wide (> 100 MHz) bandwidth. This setup enables fast nanoimaging of thermal conductivity (η) and interfacial thermal conductance (G) with very high throughputs thanks to a datapoint acquisition rate that is 500 000 × faster than measurements with conventional AFM cantilevers and ≈6000 × faster compared to art macroscale-resolution time-domain thermoreflectance measurements. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, 100 × 100 pixel maps of η and G are obtained in 200 s with a small relative uncertainty (∆η ≈ 10 % and ∆G ≈ 10 %) on a ≈ 3 µm wide polymer particle with thickness up to 220 nm. This work paves the way to study fast thermal dynamics in materials and devices at the nanoscale.
Citation
Nano Letters
Volume
22
Issue
11

Keywords

PTIR, thermal conductivity, thermal dynamics, AFM, MEMS

Citation

Wang, M. , Ramer, G. , Perez, D. , Pavlidis, G. , Schwartz, J. , Yu, L. , Ilic, R. , Aksyuk, V. and Centrone, A. (2022), High throughput nanoimaging of thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal conductance, Nano Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c00337, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=934060 (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created May 17, 2022, Updated November 29, 2022