No Arabic abstract
We study heat radiation and heat transfer for pointlike particles in a system of other objects. Starting from exact many-body expressions found from scattering theory and fluctuational electrodynamics, we find that transfer and radiation for point particles are given in terms of the Greens function of the system in the absence of the point particles. These general expressions contain no approximation for the surrounding objects. As an application, we compute the heat transfer between two point particles in the presence of a sphere of arbitrary size and show that the transfer is enhanced by several orders of magnitude through the presence of the sphere, depending on the materials. Furthermore, we compute the heat emission of a point particle in front of a planar mirror. Finally, we show that a particle placed inside a spherical mirror cavity does not radiate energy.
Near-field heat radiation and transfer are rich in various exciting effects, in particular, regarding the amplification due to the geometrical configuration of the system. In this paper, we study heat exchange in situations where the objects are confined by additional objects so that the dimensionality of heat flow is reduced. In particular, we compute the heat transfer for spherical point particles placed between two parallel plates. The presence of the plates can enhance or reduce the transfer compared to the free case and provides a slower power-law decay for large distance. We also compute the heat radiation of a sphere placed inside a spherical cavity, finding that it can be larger or smaller compared to the radiation of a free sphere. This radiation shows strong resonances as a function of the cavitys size. For example, the cooling rate of a nanosphere placed in a cavity varies by a factor of $10^5$ between cavity radii $ 2 mu {rm m} $ and $ 5 mu {rm m} $.
In d-dimensional lattices of coupled quantum harmonic oscillators, we analyze the heat current caused by two thermal baths of different temperature, which are coupled to opposite ends of the lattice, with focus on the validity of Fouriers law of heat conduction. We provide analytical solutions of the heat current through the quantum system in the non-equilibrium steady state using the rotating-wave approximation and bath interactions described by a master equation of Lindblad form. The influence of local dephasing in the transition of ballistic to diffusive transport is investigated.
The low-temperature asymptotic expressions for the Casimir interaction between two real metals described by Leontovich surface impedance are obtained in the framework of thermal quantum field theory. It is shown that the Casimir entropy computed using the impedance of infrared optics vanishes in the limit of zero temperature. By contrast, the Casimir entropy computed using the impedance of the Drude model attains at zero temperature a positive value which depends on the parameters of a system, i.e., the Nernst heat theorem is violated. Thus, the impedance of infrared optics withstands the thermodynamic test, whereas the impedance of the Drude model does not. We also perform a phenomenological analysis of the thermal Casimir force and of the radiative heat transfer through a vacuum gap between real metal plates. The characterization of a metal by means of the Leontovich impedance of the Drude model is shown to be inconsistent with experiment at separations of a few hundred nanometers. A modification of the impedance of infrared optics is suggested taking into account relaxation processes. The power of radiative heat transfer predicted from this impedance is several times less than previous predictions due to different contributions from the transverse electric evanescent waves. The physical meaning of low frequencies in the Lifshitz formula is discussed. It is concluded that new measurements of radiative heat transfer are required to find out the adequate description of a metal in the theory of electromagnetic fluctuations.
The non-equilibrium state of two oscillators with a mutual interaction and coupled to separate heat baths is discussed. Bosonic baths are considered, and an exact spectral representation for the elements of the covariance matrix is provided analytically. A wide class of spectral densities for the relevant bath modes is allowed for. The validity of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem is established for global equilibrium (both baths at the same temperature) in the stationary state. Spectral measures of entanglement are suggested by comparing to the equilibrium spectrum of zero-point fluctuations. No rotating-wave approximation is applied, and anomalous heat transport from cold to hot bath, as reported in earlier work, is demonstrated not to occur.
The performances of quantum thermometry in thermal equilibrium together with the output power of certain class of quantum engines share a common characteristic: both are determined by the heat capacity of the probe or working medium. After noticing that the heat capacity of spin ensembles can be significantly modified by collective coupling with a thermal bath, we build on the above observation to investigate the respective impact of such collective effect on quantum thermometry and quantum engines. We find that the precision of the temperature estimation is largely increased at high temperatures, reaching even the Heisenberg scaling - inversely proportional to the number of spins. For Otto engines operating close to the Carnot efficiency, collective coupling always enhances the output power. Some tangible experimental platforms are suggested.