Measurement of the acoustic-to-optical phonon coupling in multicomponent systems

In this paper we investigate the acoustic-to-optical up-conversion phonon processes in a multicomponent system. These processes take place during heat transport and limit the efficiency of heat flow. By combining time-resolved optical and heat capacity experiments we quantify the thermal coupling constant to be g similar to 0.4 10(17) W/Km(3). The method is based on selective excitation of a part of a multicomponent system, and the measurement of the thermalization dynamics by probing the linear birefringence of the sample with femtosecond resolution. In particular, we study a layered multiferroic organic-inorganic hybrid, in the vicinity of the ferroelectric phase transition. A diverging term of the heat capacity is associated to soft-mode dynamics, in agreement with previous spectroscopy measurements.