Thermal behaviour of metal films – a hyperbolic two-step model

Abstract

A perturbation technique is proposed for solution of the generalized equations governing the thermal behaviour of thin metal films described by a hyperbolic two-step model. The generalized equations of this model contains diffusion terms in both the electron and lattice energy equations and assumes that incident laser radiation is absorbed by both the electron gas and solid lattice to account for the thermal behaviour of semiconducting and impure metals. A perturbation technique is utilized to eliminate the coupling between the electron and phonon energy equations when the normalized temperature difference between electrons and phonons is a small quantity, which is true in materials exhibit high coupling factors.