Tutorial: Time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) for thermal property characterization of bulk and thin film materials

Abstract

Measuring thermal properties of materials is not only of fundamental importance in understanding the transport processes of energy carriers (electrons and phonons in solids) but also of practical interest in developing novel materials with desired thermal properties for applications in energy conversion and storage, electronics, and photonic systems. Over the past two decades, ultrafast laser-based time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) has emerged and evolved as a reliable, powerful, and versatile technique to measure the thermal properties of a wide range of bulk and thin film materials and their interfaces. This tutorial discusses the basics as well as the recent advances of the TDTR technique and its applications in the thermal characterization of a variety of materials. The tutorial begins with the fundamentals of the TDTR technique, serving as a guideline for understanding the basic principles of this technique. Several variations of the TDTR technique that function similarly as the standard TDTR but with their own unique features are introduced, followed by introducing different advanced TDTR configurations that were developed to meet different measurement conditions. This tutorial closes with a summary that discusses the current limitations and proposes some directions for future development.

Photoluminescence mapping and time-domain thermo-photoluminescence for rapid imaging and measurement of thermal conductivity of boron arsenide

“…6.To obtain a quantitative  and experimentally verify the relationship between  and PL, we further developed an optical technique that is convenient and compatible with PL and requires no extra sample preparation.Figure 3ashows the schematic of pump-probe time-domain thermo-photoluminescence (TDTP). In parallel to TDTR18,19,20 , TDTP uses a pump pulse (527 nm, 140 ns) to generate localized heat in a sample, and a weak time-delayed probe pulse (527 nm, 100 ns) to monitor the temperature and heat transfer dynamics.  is obtained by fitting the measured temperature data to the known analytical/numerical solutions.…”

A Review on Investigation of Graphene Thermal Property: Recent Development in Measurement Techniques

“…The optical based TDTR method requires smooth surface of the sample due to the enhancement of accuracy when probing the reflected laser beam. Additionally, the introduction of metal-coated layer on the rough sample surface can also an alternative way to resolve the uncertainty resulted from sample roughness [47]. Meanwhile, in TDTR method for non-2D materials, the high energy pulsed laser heats the sample in an extremely short time and then, heat is slowly dissipated to the substrate.…”

“…However, when measuring the metal-coated sample in TDTR method, the bond between sample and metal should be strong so that unexpected thermal resistance between them would not be main in the measurement ( G 1 in Fig. 2b) [47]. By using TDTR method, Mak et al [16] examined thermal conductance of graphene on SiO 2 substrate and Hopkins et al [17] measured thermal conductance at Al/graphene/SiO 2− contacts using metal coating technique.…”

High thermal conductive copper/diamond composites: state of the art

“…In this way, it reduces the errors radiative loss and contact issues that are concerning in other measurement techniques like the 3x method [28,105,106]. Thorough descriptions of the measurement methods and data analysis can be found in Refs [96,[107][108][109].…”