Quantitative thermal conductivity measurements with nanometre resolution

A quantitative thermal conductivity measurement technique, the 3 omega method, is applied in a scanning thermal microscope (SThM) with a resistive probe for the determination of thermal properties with a high spatial resolution in the nanometre range. With this set-up the quantitative thermal conductivity of materials can be determined with a deviation of less than 2%. Using gold as the reference material, the local thermal conductivities of silver and a CVD diamond film have been measured with a spatial resolution of approximately 30 nm.