Independent Determination of the Thermal Diffusivity and Conductivity of a Thin Metallic Layer Deposited on Silica

It is well known that the thermal parameters of materials confined in thin layers may significantly differ from their bulk value. Lateral heat diffusion thermoreflectance experiment is a very powerful tool for determining directly the thermal diffusivity of bulk materials and of layered structure. Nevertheless, in the latter case, experimental data are fitted with the help of a heat diffusion model in which the layer thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity are taken together into consideration. In this paper, we show that both parameters can be determined independently, in the case of a thermal conductive layer deposited on a thermal insulator, with a careful analysis of the amplitude and the phase of the lateral temperature field associated to a point source.