Quasi-ballistic phonon transport effects on the determination of the mean-free path accumulation function for the effective thermal conductivity

The mean-free path (MFP) accumulation function for the effective thermal conductivity, introduced by Dames and Chen is a compact, universal and highly useful summary of the effect of ballistic thermal transport on the effective thermal conductivity measured by various experiments. The frequency domain thermoreflectance (FDTR) experiment is especially well suited to its determination. Extraction of the accumulation function from this experiment uses the thermal penetration depth (TPD) of phonons at each frequency as a cut-off for classifying phonons as ballistic or diffusive at that frequency. In this paper, we show that using the TPD as a cut-off is arbitrary and prone to serious error. We report on a new technique to deduce the MFP accumulation function from the FDTR experiment by numerical solution of an enhanced Fourier law.

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