On interface thermal resistance associated with thermal vibrations

This Letter generalizes the well-known acoustic mismatch theory of interface thermal resistance by inclusion into consideration a broad class of thermal vibrations that were excluded from that theory by the imposition in it of the Sommerfeld radiation condition, which is required for the theory of sound but is not relevant for the analysis of heat transport. This extension preserves the main ideas of the acoustic mismatch theory but provides much better estimates for the interface resistance, which have an order-of-magnitude agreement with experiments previously published by others.