  We review the Raman shift method as a non-destructive optical tool to
investigate the thermal conductivity and demonstrate the possibility to map
this quantity with a micrometer resolution by studying thin film and bulk
materials for thermoelectric applications. In this method, a focused laser beam
both thermally excites a sample and undergoes Raman scattering at the
excitation spot. The temperature dependence of the phonon energies measured is
used as a local thermometer. We discuss that the temperature measured is an
effective one and describe how the thermal conductivity is deduced from single
temperature measurements to full temperature maps, with the help of analytical
or numerical treatments of heat diffusion. We validate the method and its
analysis on 3- and 2-dimensional single crystalline samples before applying it
to more complex Si-based materials. A suspended thin mesoporous film of
phosphorus-doped laser-sintered Si78Ge22 nanoparticles is investigated to
extract the in-plane thermal conductivity from the effective temperatures,
measured as a function of the distance to the heat sink. Using an iterative
multigrid Gauss-Seidel algorithm the experimental data can be modelled yielding
a thermal conductivity of 0.1 W/m K after normalizing by the porosity. As a
second application we map the surface of a phosphorus-doped 3-dimensional
bulk-nanocrystalline Si sample which exhibits anisotropic and oxygen-rich
precipitates. Thermal conductivities as low as 11 W/m K are found in the
regions of the precipitates, significantly lower than the 17 W/m K in the
surrounding matrix. The present work serves as a basis to more routinely use
the Raman shift method as a versatile tool for thermal conductivity
investigations, both for samples with high and low thermal conductivity and in
a variety of geometries.
