Improved thermal relaxation method for the simultaneous measurement of the specific heat and thermal conductivity

. A novel method for the simultaneous, high-resolution measurement of the specific heat c and the thermal conductivity κ is presented. A new experimental setup has been developed with special emphasis on the elimination of systematic errors arising from radiative heat loss. A self-consistent data evaluation method is implemented which takes the effects of the sample geometry on c and κ properly into account. The measurements were performed over a broad temperature regime from 3 K up to room temperature on three compounds from the family of strongly correlated electron systems. The differences in their thermal properties and their highly sample-dependent sizes and shapes demonstrate the extended scope of the proposed method.