Decoupling the Roles of Defects/Impurities and Wrinkles in Thermal Conductivity of Wafer-scale hBN Films

TL;DR

This study investigates how defects, impurities, and wrinkles affect the thermal conductivity of large-area hexagonal boron nitride films, revealing that defects have a greater impact on heat transfer resistance than wrinkles.

Contribution

It introduces a finite element modeling approach to decouple the effects of defects and wrinkles on the thermal conductivity of wafer-scale hBN films.

Findings

Thermal conductivity varies non-monotonically with film thickness.

Defects contribute more significantly to thermal resistance than wrinkles.

Effective thermal conductivities are estimated for different film thicknesses.

Abstract

We demonstrate a non-monotonic evolution of thermal conductivity of large-area hexagonal boron nitride films with thickness. Wrinkles and defects/impurities are present in these films. Raman spectroscopy, an optothermal non-contact technique, is employed to probe the temperature and laser power dependence property of the Raman active E2ghigh phonon mode, which in turn is used to estimate the rise in the temperature of the films under different laser powers. As the conventional Fourier law of heat diffusion cannot be directly employed analytically to evaluate the thermal conductivity of these films with defects and wrinkles, finite element modeling is used instead. In the model, average heat resistance is used to incorporate an overall defect structure, and Voronoi cells with contact resistance at the cell boundaries are constructed to mimic the wrinkled domains. The effective thermal conductivity is estimated to be 87, 55, and 117 W/m.K for the 2, 10, and 30 nm-thick films, respectively. We also present a quantitative estimation of the thermal resistance by defects and wrinkles individually to the heat flow. Our study reveals that the defects/impurities render a much higher resistance to heat transfer in the films than wrinkles.