No Arabic abstract
We study the radiative heat transfer between multilayer structures made by a periodic repetition of a graphene sheet and a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) slab. Surface plasmons in a monolayer graphene can couple with a hyperbolic phonon polaritons in a single hBN film to form hybrid polaritons that can assist photon tunneling. For periodic multilayer graphene/hBN structures, the stacked metallic/dielectric array can give rise to a further effective hyperbolic behavior, in addition to the intrinsic natural hyperbolic behavior of hBN. The effective hyperbolicity can enable more hyperbolic polaritons that enhance the photon tunneling and hence the near-field heat transfer. However, the hybrid polaritons on the surface, i.e. surface plasmon-phonon polaritons, dominate the near-field heat transfer between multilayer structures when the topmost layer is graphene. The effective hyperbolic regions can be well predicted by the effective medium theory (EMT), thought EMT fails to capture the hybrid surface polaritons and results in a heat transfer rate much lower compared to the exact calculation. The chemical potential of the graphene sheets can be tuned through electrical gating and results in an additional modulation of the heat transfer. We found that the near-field heat transfer between multilayer structure does not increase monotonously with the number of layer in the stack, which provides a way to control the heat transfer rate by the number of graphene layers in the multilayer structure. The results may benefit the applications of near-field energy harvesting and radiative cooling based on hybrid polaritons in two-dimensional materials.
Energy can be transferred in a radiative manner between objects with different electrical fluctuations. In this work, we consider near-field energy transfer between two separated parallel plates: one is graphene-covered boron nitride and the other a magneto-optic medium. We first study the energy transfer between the two plates having the same temperature. An electric current through the graphene gives rise to nonequilibrium fluctuations and induces the energy transfer. Both the magnitude and direction of the energy flux can be controlled by the electric current and an in-plane magnetic field in the magneto-optic medium. This is due to the interplay between nonreciprocal effective photonic temperature in graphene and nonreciprocal surface modes in the magneto-optic plate. Furthermore, we report that a tunable thermoelectric current can be generated in the graphene in the presence of a temperature difference between the two plates.
The radiative heat transfer between gold nanoparticle layers is presented using the coupled dipole method. Gold nanoparticles are modelled as effective electric and magnetic dipoles interacting via electromagnetic fluctuations. The effect of higher-order multipoles is implemented in the expression of electric polarizability to calculate the interactions at short distances. Our findings show that the near-field radiation reduces as the radius of the nanoparticles is increased. Also, the magnetic dipole contribution to the heat exchange becomes more important for larger particles. When one layer is displayed in parallel with respect to the other layer, the near-field heat transfer exhibits oscillatory-like features due to the influence of the individual nanostructures. Further details about the effect of the nanoparticles size are also discussed.
The dynamic heat transfer between two half-spaces separated by a vacuum gap due to coupling of their surface modes is modelled using the theory that describes the dynamic energy transfer between two coupled harmonic oscillators each separately connected to a heat bath and with the heat baths maintained at different temperatures. The theory is applied for the case when the two surfaces are made up of a polar crystal which supports surface polaritons that can be excited at room temperature and the predicted heat transfer is compared with the steady state heat transfer value calculated from standard fluctuational electrodynamics theory. It is observed that for small time intervals the value of heat flux can reach as high as 1.5 times that of steady state value.
Extreme near-field heat transfer between metallic surfaces is a subject of debate as the state-of-the-art theory and experiments are in disagreement on the energy carriers driving heat transport. In an effort to elucidate the physics of extreme near-field heat transfer between metallic surfaces, this Letter presents a comprehensive model combining radiation, acoustic phonon and electron transport across sub-10-nm vacuum gaps. The results obtained for gold surfaces show that in the absence of bias voltage, acoustic phonon transport is dominant for vacuum gaps smaller than ~2 nm. The application of a bias voltage significantly affects the dominant energy carriers as it increases the phonon contribution mediated by the long-range Coulomb force and the electron contribution due to a lower potential barrier. For a bias voltage of 0.6 V, acoustic phonon transport becomes dominant at a vacuum gap of 5 nm, whereas electron tunneling dominates at sub-1-nm vacuum gaps. The comparison of the theory against experimental data from the literature suggests that well-controlled measurements between metallic surfaces are needed to quantify the contributions of acoustic phonon and electron as a function of the bias voltage.
Near-field radiative heat transfer (NFRHT) is strongly related with many applications such as near-field imaging, thermos-photovoltaics and thermal circuit devices. The active control of NFRHT is of great interest since it provides a degree of tunability by external means. In this work, a magnetically tunable multi-band NFRHT is revealed in a system of two suspended graphene sheets at room temperature. It is found that the single-band spectra for B=0 split into multi-band spectra under an external magnetic field. Dual-band spectra can be realized for a modest magnetic field (e.g., B=4 T). One band is determined by intra-band transitions in the classical regime, which undergoes a blue shift as the chemical potential increases. Meanwhile, the other band is contributed by inter-Landau-level transitions in the quantum regime, which is robust against the change of chemical potentials. For a strong magnetic field (e.g., B=15 T), there is an additional band with the resonant peak appearing at near-zero frequency (microwave regime), stemming from the magneto-plasmon zero modes. The great enhancement of NFRHT at such low frequency has not been found in any previous systems yet. This work may pave a way for multi-band thermal information transfer based on atomically thin graphene sheets.