Electrical measurement of absolute temperature and temperature transients in a buried nanostructure under ultrafast optical heating

H. F.  Yang; X. K.  Hu; N.  Liebing; T.  Böhnert; J. D.  Costa; M.  Tarequzzaman; R.  Ferreira; S.  Sievers; M.  Bieler; H. W.  Schumacher

doi:10.1063/1.4985434

Abstract

We report absolute temperature measurements in a buried nanostructure with a sub-nanosecond temporal resolution. For this purpose, we take advantage of the temperature dependence of the resistance of a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) as detected by a fast sampling oscilloscope. After calibrating the measurement setup using steady-state electric heating, we are able to quantify temperature changes in the MTJ induced by femtosecond optical heating of the metal contact lying several 100 nm above the MTJ. We find that a femtosecond pulse train with an average power of 400 mW and a repetition rate of 76 MHz leads to a constant temperature increase of 80 K and a temporally varying temperature change of 2 K in the MTJ. The maximum temperature change in the MTJ occurs 4 ns after the femtosecond laser pulses hit the metal contact, which is supported by simulations. Our work provides a scheme to quantitatively study local temperatures in nanoscale structures and might be important for the testing of nanoscale thermal transport simulations.

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