We study the electron and phonon thermal coupling mechanisms at interfaces between gold films with and without Ti adhesion layers on various substrates via pump-probe time-domain thermoreflectance. The coupling between the electronic and the vibrational states is increased by more than a factor of five with the inclusion of an $3 nm Ti adhesion layer between the Au film and the nonmetal substrate. Furthermore, we show an increase in the rate of relaxation of the electron system with increasing electron and lattice temperatures induced by the laser power and attribute this to enhanced electron-electron scattering, a transport channel that becomes more pronounced with increased electron temperatures. The inclusion of the Ti layer also results in a linear dependence of the electron-phonon relaxation rate with temperature, which we attribute to the coupling of electrons at and near the Ti/substrate interface. This enhanced electron-phonon coupling due to electroninterface scattering is shown to have negligible influence on the Kapitza conductances between the Au/Ti and the substrates at longer time scales when the electrons and phonons in the metal have equilibrated. These results suggest that only during highly nonequilibrium conditions between the electrons and phonons (T e ) T p ) does electron-phonon scattering at an interface contribute to thermal boundary conductance. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

The advances in phonon spectroscopy in homogeneous solids have unveiled extremely useful physics regard-10 ing the contribution of phonon energies and mean free paths to the thermal transport in solids. However, as 11 material systems decrease to length scales less than the phonon mean free paths, thermal transport can become

Energy processes and vibrations in biological macromolecules such as proteins ultimately dictate biological, chemical, and physical functions in living materials. These energetic vibrations in the ribbon-like motifs of proteins interact on self-similar structures and fractal-like objects over a range of length scales of the protein (a few angstroms to the size of the protein itself, a few nanometers). In fact, the fractal geometries of protein molecules create a complex network of vibrations; therefore, proteins represent an ideal material system to study the underlying mechanisms driving vibrational thermal transport in a dense, fractal network. However, experimental studies of thermal energy transport in proteins have been limited to dispersive protein suspensions, which limits the knowledge that can be extracted about how vibrational energy is transferred in a pure protein solid. We overcome this by synthesizing solid, water-insoluble protein films for thermal conductivity measurements via time-domain thermoreflectance. We measure the thermal conductivity of bovine serum albumin and myoglobin solid films over a range of temperatures from 77 to 296 K. These temperature trends indicate that anharmonic coupling of vibrations in the protein is contributing to thermal conductivity. This first-ever observation of anharmonic-like trends in the thermal conductivity of a fully dense protein forms the basis of validation of seminal theories of vibrational energy-transfer processes in fractal objects.

In this study, we calculate the steady-state temperature rise that results from laser heating of multilayer thin films using the heat diffusion equation. For time- and frequency-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR and FDTR) that rely on modulated laser sources, we decouple the modulated and steady-state temperature profiles to understand the conditions needed to achieve a single temperature approximation throughout the experimental volume, allowing for the estimation of spatially invariant thermal parameters within this volume. We consider low thermal conductivity materials, including amorphous silicon dioxide (a-SiO2), polymers, and disordered C60, to demonstrate that often-used analytical expressions fail to capture this temperature rise under realistic experimental conditions, such as when a thin-film metal transducer is used or when pump and probe spot sizes are significantly different. To validate these findings and demonstrate a practical approach to simultaneously calculate the steady-state temperature and extract thermal parameters in TDTR, we present an iterative algorithm for obtaining the steady-state temperature rise and measure the thermal conductivity and thermal boundary conductance of a-SiO2 with a 65-nm gold thin film transducer. Furthermore, we discuss methods of heat dissipation to include the use of conductive substrates as well as the use of bidirectional heat flow geometries. Finally, we quantify the influence of the optical penetration depth (OPD) on the steady-state temperature rise to reveal that only when the OPD approaches the characteristic length of the temperature decay does it alter the temperature profile relative to the surface heating condition.