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Thermal transport across interfaces can play a critical role in nanosystems for thermal management and thermal energy conversion. Here, we show the dependence of the thermal boundary conductance (G) of the interface between a 70-nm Al transducer and a Si substrate on the size of a laser pump diameter (D) in the time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) experiments at room temperature. For D ≥ 30 μm, G approaches to a constant where diffusion dominates the heat transfer processes. When D decreases from 30 μm to 3.65 μm, G decreases from 240 to 170 MW/m2K due to the increasing nonlocal effects from nondiffusive heat transport. This finding is vital to our understanding of the thermal boundary conductance: it depends not only on inherent interfacial conditions but also on external heating conditions, which makes the accurate measurements and theoretical predictions of thermal transport across interfaces in micro/nanosystems more challenging.

We present a continuum hybrid phonon gas model to describe transient ballistic-diffusive heat transport. In this model, heat energy is carried by a mixture of longitudinal and transverse phonon gases so that the distinction between longitudinal and transverse phonon excitations is taken into account. This new model is validated by the successful reconstruction of benchmark cases of heat-pulse experiments in NaF, which have never been completely reconstructed before. It is elucidated how thermal pulses are transmitted by longitudinal and transverse phonon gases. This model not only helps us yield new insight in transient ballistic-diffusive heat conduction mechanisms but also provides numerical tools to study transient ballistic-diffusive heat conduction in nanoelectronic and modern optoelectronics.