Spatial Mapping of Thermal Boundary Conductance at Metal–Molybdenum Diselenide Interfaces

Improving the thermal transport across interfaces is a necessary consideration for micro- and nanoelectronic devices and necessitates accurate measurement of the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) and understanding of transport mechanisms. Two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been studied extensively for their electrical properties, including the metal–TMD electrical contact resistance, but the thermal properties of these interfaces are significantly less explored irrespective of their high importance in their electronic devices. We isolate individual islands of MoSe2 grown by chemical vapor deposition using photolithography and correlate the 2D variation of TBC with optical microscope images of the MoSe2 islands. We measure the 2D spatial variation of the TBC at metal–MoSe2–SiO2 interfaces using a modified time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) technique, which requires much less time than full TDTR scans. The thermoreflectance signal at a single probe delay time is compared with a correlation curve, which enables us to estimate the change in the signal with respect to the TBC at the metal–MoSe2–SiO2 interface as opposed to recording the decay of the thermoreflectance signal over delay times of several nanoseconds. The results show a higher TBC across the Ti–MoSe2–SiO2 interface compared to Al–MoSe2–SiO2. An image-clustering method is developed to differentiate the TBC for different numbers of MoSe2 layers, which reveals that the TBC in single-layer regions is higher than that in the bilayer. We perform traditional TDTR measurements over a range of delay times and verify that TBC is higher at the Ti–MoSe2–SiO2 interface compared to Al–MoSe2–SiO2, highlighting the importance of the choice of metal for heat dissipation at electrical contacts in TMD devices.