On 22 April 2022, Reviews of Modern Physics published online a full-length review entitled "Interfacial Thermal Resistance: Past, Present and Future". A full-length review (50 pages). The authors are Prof. Jie Chen and Prof. Xiangfan Xu from the School of Physical Science and Engineering/Centre for Phononics and Thermal Sciences, Tongji University, Prof. Jun Zhou from the Centre for Quantum Transport and Thermal Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, and Prof. Baowen Li from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, respectively.
When two materials with different temperatures are put into contact, heat will flow from the high-temperature one to low temperature one. This phenomenon seems simple but is far more complicated than we thought. There are many interesting fundamental questions to be understood both from a physicist’s point of view, such as how the heat carriers (phonons, electrons, etc.) are transported across the interface (boundary) between these two materials, and from an engineering application point of view, such as how to efficiently remove heat from microelectric devices, batteries, quantum devices, etc.
Interfacial thermal resistance (ITR) is the main obstacle for heat flows from one material to another. Understanding ITR becomes essential for the removal of redundant heat from fast and powerful electronic and photonic devices, batteries, etc. In this review, a comprehensive examination of ITR is conducted. Particular focus is placed on the theoretical, computational, and experimental developments in the 30 years after the last review given by Swartz and Pohl in 1989. To be self-consistent, the fundamental theories, such as the acoustic mismatch model, the diffuse mismatch model, and the two-temperature model, are reviewed. The most popular computational methods, including lattice dynamics, molecular dynamics, the Green’s function method, and the Boltzmann transport equation method, are discussed in detail. Various experimental tools in probing ITR, such as the time-domain thermoreflectance, the thermal bridge method, the 3ω method, and the electron-beam self-heating method, are illustrated. This review covers ITR (also known as the thermal boundary resistance or Kapitza resistance) of solid-solid, solid-liquid, and solid-gas interfaces. Such fundamental challenges as how to define the interface, temperature, etc. when the materials scale down to the nanoscale or atomic scale and the opportunities for future studies are also pointed out.
This work is published online in Reviews of Modern Physics, 94, 025002 (2022) and has been supported by by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China ,the Science and TechnologyCommission of Shanghai Municipality, the Key-Area Research andDevelopment Program of Guangdong Province and so on.
RMP is the most authoritative review journal in the field of physics, inviting leading physics scholars to review and provide perspectives on the field. rMP was founded in 1929, and to date no more than 15 papers have been published with a mainland Chinese research institution as the first unit. The publication of this paper demonstrates the profound accumulation and leading position of the Tongji University team in the international science and technology frontier of interfacial heat transfer at the micro and nano scale.
REFERENCES
1. J. Chen, X.F. Xu, J. Zhou and B. Li, Interfacial Thermal Resistance: Past, Present and Future, Reviews of Modern Physics 94, 025002 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.94.025002
2. G. L. Pollack, Kapitza Resistance, Reviews of Modern Physics 41, 48-81 (1969), https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.41.48
3. E. T. Swartz and R. O. Pohl, Thermal boundary resistance, Reviews of Modern Physics 61, 605-668 (1989), https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.61.605
4. X.F. Xu, J. Chen, J. Zhou and B. Li, Thermal Conductivity of Polymers and Their Nanocomposites, Advanced Materials 30, 1705544 (2018), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/adma.201705544
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