Energy transfer between two vacuum-gapped metal plates: Coulomb fluctuations and electron tunneling

Abstract

Recent experimental measurements for near-field radiative heat transfer between two bodies have been able to approach the gap distance within 2 nm, where the contributions of Coulomb fluctuation and electron's tunneling are comparable. Using the nonequilibrium Green's function method in the G0W0 approximation, based on a tight-binding model, we obtain for the energy current a Caroli formula from the Meir-Wingreen formula in the local equilibrium approximation. Also, the Caroli formula is consistent with the evanescent part of the heat transfer from the theory of fluctuational electrodynamics. We go beyond the local equilibrium approximation to study the energy transfer in the crossover region from electron tunneling to Coulomb fluctuation based on a numerical calculation.I.

Role of disorder in plasmon-assisted near-field heat transfer between two-dimensional metals

“…In this limit, heat transfer is dominated by the Coulomb interaction. Our analysis is based on the standard expression for the heat current per unit area [23,24,29,31,32],…”

“…The density response function is related to the in-plane longitudinal optical conductivity, σ (q, ω) = (iω/q 2 )e 2 (q, ω). Equation ( 1) can be derived from the Coulomb limit of fluctuational electrodynamics [23], from nonequilibrium Green's function formalism [31], or from the kinetic equation [29].…”

Dynamical polarizability of graphene with spatial dispersion

“…In the momentum space, the 2D electrical conductivity has the relation σ = iω /q 2 that can be obtained from the linear response electrodynamics. These quantities have been proved to play a pivotal role in developing a variety range of physical applications especially for the near-field energy transport [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and the Casimir effects [13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

Near field versus far field in radiative heat transfer between two-dimensional metals

“…The importance of magnetic coupling in the near-field heat transfer between well-conducting metals has been emphasized [11,12]. In the extreme near-field limit, heat transfer due to the electrostatic Coulomb interaction has also been studied [13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”