No abstract

Micro-Raman spectroscopy has been preferred recently to measure the thermal conductivity of thin-films due to its nondestructive and non-contact nature. However, the thermal size effects originating from both localized heat generation from Raman laser and phonon scattering at boundaries may cause erroneous estimation of the thermal conductivities with the current approach. In this study, the gray phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) is solved to improve the results of micro-Raman thermal conductivity measurements. Due to the frequency independence of single phonon mode in the gray BTE model, our method stays ahead of most theoretical methods in calculation time while giving adequate agreement with the literature data. The improved thermal conductivities are evaluated at various laser powers and focal lengths. Subsequently, the values of thermal conductivities are compared with a simple slab model in which the deduction of thermal conductivity in sub-micron thicknesses is calculated using reduced heat flux through the slab resulting from phonon directional energy densities. The results show that subsequent errors are present in measuring the thermal conductivity of relatively thick, thin films with this technique which are noticed by comparing with the simple slab model. Finally, a virtual micro-Raman thermography experiment is developed, and its validity is verified by the same slab model.