Heater assisted raman method to measure interfacial thermal conductance in van der waals heterostructures

Two-dimensional (2D) layered materials have been the focus of materials research for more than a decade. Stacking different 2D nanosheets and 3D substrates with van der Waals interactions in between has opened up new ways to sophisticated design of novel device functionalities and platforms for new physics. The performance of van der Waals heterostructure (vdWH) devices can be most often limited by the heat dissipation issue, but the thermal transport in vdWHs has rarely been studied yet. This paper presents a novel heater assisted Raman method to accurately measure interfacial thermal conductance between every two layers in the vdWH, which is suitable to detect interfacial thermal transport between all kinds of nanosheets no matter whether the neighboring layer is electrical conductor or insulator. In this method, a transparent insulating thin layer and a patterned transparent conducting indium-tin-oxide (ITO) layer are successively sputtered on top of the vdWH. The ITO layer is electrically heated to provide vertical heat flux, while the temperatures of each atomic layer and the substrate surface are simultaneously detected from their temperature dependent Raman band shifts, thus the interfacial thermal conductance between every two layers can be accurately determined from the ITO's Joule heating power and the Raman-measured temperatures. With high sensitivity and accuracy, the measurement method proposed here provides a general way to experimentally investigate interfacial thermal transport across both electrically conducting and insulating van der Waals interfaces in 2D-material-based devices.