Probe beam deflection technique with liquid immersion for fast mapping of thermal conductance

Frequency-domain probe beam deflection (FD-PBD) is an experimental technique for measuring thermal properties that combines heating by a modulated pump laser and measurement of the temperature field via thermoelastic displacement of the sample surface. In the conventional implementation of FD-PBD, the data are mostly sensitive to the in-plane thermal diffusivity. We describe an extension of FD-PBD that introduces sensitivity to through-plane thermal conductance by immersing the sample in a dielectric liquid and measuring the beam deflection created by the temperature field of the liquid. We demonstrate the accuracy of the method by measuring (1) the thermal conductivity of a 310 nm thick thermally grown oxide on Si, (2) the thermal boundary conductance of bonded interface between a 3C-SiC film and a single crystal diamond substrate, and (3) the thermal conductivities of several bulk materials. We map the thermal boundary conductance of a 3C-SiC/diamond interface with a precision of 1% using a lock-in time constant of 3 ms and dwell time of 15 ms. The spatial resolution and maximum probing depth are proportional to the radius of the focused laser beams and can be varied over the range of 1-20 μm and 4-80 μm, respectively, by varying the 1/e² intensity radius of the focused laser beams from 2 to 40 μm. FD-PBD with liquid immersion thus enables fast mapping of spatial variations in thermal boundary conductance of deeply buried interfaces.