Feasibility Study of a New Model for the Thermal Boundary Resistance at an Interface of Solid Thin Films

The thermal boundary resistance (TBR) is still a challengeable subject since its mechanism to explain quantitatively is not clear in spite of its importance. We performed non-equilibrium molecular dynamic (NEMD) simulation to evaluate TBR at an epitaxial solid interface composed of two different materials. Solid argon is selected as a simulation material since it is a non-conductor electrically, so that energy transportation is caused only by lattice vibration. The history to grasp the mechanism on TBR is fairly long and the various theories were developed such as an acoustic mismatch model (AMM), an acoustic impedance mismatch model (AIMM) and a diffuse mismatch model (DMM), however any model can’t make a success of analyzing TBR quantitatively. The mechanism of TBR can be explained as the energy reflection at an interface caused by the discontinuity of acoustic impedance even in a microscale system from this study. However it should be corrected with the consideration of a microscale characteristic. The corrected microscale acoustic impedance mismatch model (CM-AIMM), which is developed in this study, fairly well predicts TBR compared with any other existing models.