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    Thermal boundary conductance across epitaxial metal/sapphire interfaces

    Yee Rui Koh1,*, Jingjing Shi2,*, Baiwei Wang3, Renjiu Hu4, Habib Ahmad5, Sit Kerdsongpanya3, Erik Milosevic3, W. Alan Doolittle5, Daniel Gall3 et al.

    Zhiting Tian4, Samuel Graham2,6,†, and Patrick E. Hopkins1,7,8,‡

    • 1Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, USA
    • 2George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA
    • 3Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA
    • 4Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
    • 5School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA
    • 6School of Materials Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332, USA
    • 7Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, USA
    • 8Department of Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, USA

    • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
    • †sgraham@gatech.edu
    • ‡phopkins@virginia.edu
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    Phys. Rev. B 102, 205304 – Published 23 November, 2020

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.102.205304

    Abstract

    As electronic devices shrink down to their ultimate limit, the fundamental understanding of interfacial thermal transport becomes essential in thermal management. However, a comprehensive understanding of phonon transport mechanisms that drive interfacial thermal transport is still under development. The thermal transport across interfaces can be strongly affected by factors such as crystalline structure, surface roughness, chemical diffusion, etc. These complications lead to a significant quantitative uncertainty between experimentally measured thermal boundary conductance (TBC) across real material interfaces and theoretically calculated TBCs that are often predicted on structurally and/or chemically ideal interfaces. In this paper, we report on the thermal conductance across interfaces between various epitaxially grown metal films (Co, Ru, and Al) and c-plane sapphire substrates via time-domain thermoreflectance over the temperature range of ∼80 to ∼500 K. The room-temperature interface conductances of Al/sapphire, Co/sapphire, and Ru/sapphire are all ∼350MWm−1K−1 despite the phonon spectra differences among the metals. We compare our results to predictions of TBC using atomistic Green's function calculations and the modal nonequilibrium Landauer method with transmission from the diffuse mismatch model. We found a consistent quantitative agreement between the experimentally measured TBCs and the predictions using the modal nonequilibrium Landauer model for the Al/Al2O3, Co/Al2O3, and Ru/Al2O3 interfaces. This result suggests that interfacial elastic phonon thermal transport dominates TBC for the various epitaxial metal/sapphire combinations of interest in this work, while other mechanisms are negligible.

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    Phys. Rev. B 102, 205304– Published 23 November, 2020
    • Received 19 July 2020
    • Revised 30 September 2020
    • Accepted 1 October 2020
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