Thermoreflectance instruments are generally home-built; they can be difficult to construct, align, and maintain, especially for the novice. The goal of this workshop is to provide practical advice from a pool of institutional knowledge beyond theory. Speakers will share their insights and tips for optimizing thermoreflectance instrument design, methods, and data analysis. Topics will include common measurement techniques (TDTR, FDTR, SSTR), TR-MOKE, and advanced measurement configurations and applications.
This workshop is intended to be an open forum for attendees to share their experience and insight with thermoreflectance based methods. Key topics that will be covered are the underlying principles of these methods, the instrumentation involved, data acquisition and analysis, and the assumptions each method holds. Both traditional and novel implementations will be discussed, so that all listeners and participants can learn something regardless of personal experience with this field of thermophysical property measurements.
In this talk, I will discuss the integration of a numerical, least-squares fitting routine into conventional frequency-domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) measurements to extract the thermal properties of materials and the thermal boundary conductance across interfaces in samples with complex geometric features. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the utility of FDTR for (1) measuring the thermal properties of materials in-situ (i.e., in actual device architectures) and (2) improving the sensitivity of the technique to so-called “buried” interfaces. Critical insights into measurement sensitivity and uncertainty will be discussed, as well as practical limitations associated with such experiments. The presentation will end with a discussion of challenges associated with these measurements and the need for further refinement in future work.