A study on the thermal conductance of interface between dissimilar metals

Abstract

Whether diffuse mismatch model for electrons (DMMe) hold true in more general cases remains largely unexplored, especially in cases where at least one material does not behave like a free-electron metal and/or the interface is smooth enough to allow non-diffuse transmission of electrons. In this study, DMMe was proposed to predict the thermal conductance of metal-metal interfaces. A set of aluminum-X samples (X = Cu, Ag, Fe, Ni) were grown and the time domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) technique was used to measure the metal-metal interface conductance. It was then compared to the two variants of the DMMe-using both a crude theory based on free-electron metals and accurate band structures provided by density functional theory.