Interpretation of thermoreflectance measurements with a two-temperature model including non-surface heat deposition

Abstract

We develop a solution to the two-temperature diffusion equation in axisymmetric cylindrical coordinates to model heat transport in thermoreflectance experiments. Our solution builds upon prior solutions that account for two-channel diffusion in each layer of an N-layered geometry, but adds the ability to deposit heat at any location within each layer. We use this solution to account for non-surface heating in the transducer layer of thermoreflectance experiments that challenge the timescales of electron-phonon coupling. A sensitivity analysis is performed to identify important parameters in the solution and to establish a guideline for when to use the two-temperature model to interpret thermoreflectance data. We then fit broadband frequency domain thermoreflectance (BB-FDTR) measurements of SiO2 and platinum at a temperature of 300 K with our two-temperature solution to parameterize the gold/chromium transducer layer. We then refit BB-FDTR measurements of silicon and find that accounting for non-equilibrium between electrons and phonons in the gold layer does lessen the previously observed heating frequency dependence reported in Regner et al. [Nat. Commun. 4, 1640 (2013)] but does not completely eliminate it. We perform BB-FDTR experiments on silicon with an aluminum transducer and find limited heating frequency dependence, in agreement with time domain thermoreflectance results. We hypothesize that the discrepancy between thermoreflectance measurements with different transducers results in part from spectrally dependent phonon transmission at the transducer/silicon interface.