Optomechanical method for characterizing thermal transport across van der Waals interfaces

Abstract

For the development of nanoscale electronics and photonics using atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials, it is important to realize van der Waals (vdW) interfaces with low thermal resistance, to minimize performance reduction caused by heat accumulation. However, characterizing the thermal interface resistance between vdW materials is still a challenge. Here, we introduce a novel optomechanical methodology to characterize the thermal transport across interfaces in 2D heterostructures. We first determine the specific heat and thermal conductivity as the function of temperature for the upper and lower material layers separately and then extract the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) of the heterostructure from its thermal time constant. We obtain a TBC of $2.41 \pm 1.03$ and $4.14 \pm 1.74$~\si{MW m^{2} K^{-1}} for FePS$_3$/WSe$_2$ and MoS$_2$/FePS$_3$ interfaces, respectively, which are comparable to values reported in the literature. Moreover, they agree with a Debye model including the acoustic impedance mismatch of flexural phonons. This work enables efficient thermal management down to the nanoscale and offers new insights into energy dissipation in vdW heterostructures.