TY - CHAP A1 - Hartmann, Jürgen T1 - Thermal characterisation of diamond T2 - Properties, Growth and Applications of Diamond N2 - Thermal characterisation of diamond is one of the key issues in assessing material quality since thermal parameters are strongly related to other features like isotopic constitution, defect content and microstructure (see Datareview A 1.5). Hence, the macroscopic thermal conductivity can often be taken as a figure-of-merit for diamond quality relevant for industrial applications. Determining thermal conductivity of diamond materials does not require, in principle, techniques other than those used for thermal assessment of more common materials and the standard methods as well as their application to diamond have been described in detail in rather complete review articles [1, 2]. Recent advancements in methodology have mainly been focused on thermal microscopy for measuring conductivity in extremely small volumes and finally single grains of polycrystalline material [3] and to quantitatively determine resistances across thermal barriers related to grain boundaries in thin films [4]. In this survey we summarise the main features of the standard techniques and briefly review the technology of quantitative thermal microscopy. It is difficult to precisely control and measure heat flow and radiation and, hence, thermal measurements generally yield only a rather limited precision; this fully applies also to measurements on diamond materials. An accuracy of a few per cent has to be regarded as excellent while the precision of most measurements is at a 5 to 10% level or below. As demonstrated by a recent round robin test [5], this especially applies to the characterisation of polycrystalline thin films where measurements may be strongly affected by the … Y1 - 2001 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fhws/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1876 PB - Institute of Engineering & Technology ER -