Nanosecond transient thermoreflectance method for characterizing anisotropic thermal conductivity.

A method is presented to characterize the anisotropic thermal properties of materials based on nanosecond transient thermoreflectance (TTR). An analytical heat transfer model is derived for the TTR signal, showing that the signal is sensitive to out-of-plane and in-plane heat conductions at distinct time scales. This sensitivity feature can be exploited to simultaneously determine the out-of-plane and in-plane thermal conductivities. Examples are given for molybdenum disulphide, hexagonal boron nitride, and highly oriented pyrolytic graphite to assess the validity of this method.