Thermal bridging effect enhancing heat transport across graphene interfaces with pinhole defects

Interfacial thermal conductance (G) is of critical significance to the efficient thermal management of two-dimensional (2D) material devices. Despite the importance of defects engineering in tuning G, the mechanisms of heat transport across defective graphene interfaces remain unclear. In this study, we have identified and demonstrated the origins of the enhanced heat transport across pinhole defective graphene through our ultrafast pump-probe measurements and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In prior work, the enhanced G across defective graphene interfaces was commonly attributed to the improved overlap of phonon density of states (DOS) or interfacial coupling strength. We, however, observe a remarkable 2.5-fold increase in heat conduction and a distinctly different temperature dependence of G for defective graphene with the same superstrate and substrate material, compared to pristine graphene. In contrast, interfaces with different superstrate and substrate materials show only minor changes (<15%) in thermal conductance after introducing defects in the graphene layer. Through careful analysis of our MD simulations for various defective graphene interfaces, we conclude that, contradictory to common beliefs, it is the formation of direct contact thermal bridge, instead of the improvement in the phonon DOS overlap or interfacial coupling strength, that has a decisive effect and promotes heat transport across defective graphene interfaces. The differing impacts of the thermal bridge on G of defective graphene sandwiched by layers of the same and different materials are primarily attributed to the varying coupling strength between the substrate and superstrate. Our work provides important insights and physical understandings of the mechanisms of heat conduction across defective graphene interfaces.