Spatiotemporal mapping of anisotropic thermal transport in GaN thin films via ultrafast X-ray diffraction

Efficient thermal management is essential for the reliability of modern power electronics, where increasing device density leads to severe heat dissipation challenges. However, in thin-film systems, thermal transport is often compromised by interfacial resistance and microscale defects introduced during synthesis or transfer, which are difficult to characterize using conventional techniques. Here we present a non-contact, spatiotemporal-resolved ultrafast X-ray diffraction method to extract in-plane thermal conductivity and thermal boundary conductance, using GaN thin films on silicon as a model system. By tracking the pump-induced lattice strain, we reconstruct the lateral heat flow dynamics and quantitatively probe thermal transport near a wrinkle defect. We uncover pronounced asymmetric heat dissipation across the wrinkle, with a four-fold reduction in the local thermal conductivity near the wrinkle and a 25% drop in interfacial conductance. Our work demonstrates that ultrafast X-ray diffraction can serve as a precise thermal metrology tool for characterizing heat transport in multilayered thin-film structures for next-generation microelectronic devices. Measuring heat flow within multilayer thin films remains a long-standing challenge. Here, authors use ultrafast X-ray diffraction to map heat transport in GaN films, revealing anisotropic flow and defect-induced thermal bottlenecks.