Metric for quantifying elastic and inelastic thermal transport at interfaces

Quantifying elastic and inelastic phonon scattering at interfaces is critical for designing corresponding devices with desired thermal properties. However, a general metric for quickly characterizing the contributions to interfacial thermal conductance from elastic and inelastic phonon scattering processes is lacking. Here, the authors introduce a general metric based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence and interfacial anharmonic ratio to quickly assess the contributions to interfacial thermal conductance from elastic and inelastic phonon scattering.