Radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale: experimental trends and challenges

Abstract

Beyond the usual surface-to-surface Planck's law of thermal radiation, nanoscale radiative heat transfer is experiencing a revolution.

Scaling Planck's law: a unified approach to the Casimir effect and radiative heat-conductance in nanogaps

“…Somehow surprisingly, the vast amount of experimental work done so far has originated the opinion that Planck's law of radiation fails to describe adequately thermal radiation and radiative heat exchange at the nanoscale. 2,20–23 The narrowband emission spectrum almost coherent narrowband observed in the sub-wavelength scales seems not compatible with the broadband emission spectrum corresponding to Black-body radiation.…”

Environment dependent vibrational heat transport in molecular Junctions : Rectification, quantum effects, vibrational mismatch

“…But, one may go through Refs. [59][60][61] for recent developments in the radiative heat transport at nanoscale.…”

Polarization properties of Raman scattering by surface phonon polaritons in GaAsP nanowires

“…Thermal emission is another rapidly growing area for SPhP applications. Distance, spectral, polarisation, and angular control of thermal emitters-absorbers has been demonstrated via coupling of far-field [12] or near-field [13,14] radiation to SPhPs. In addition, energy routing and focussing by means of SPhP has been predicted [15].…”

“…In addition, energy routing and focussing by means of SPhP has been predicted [15]. SPhP based photonic control of thermal emission has allowed for improvement of traditional applications such as thermophotovoltaics [13,14] and also lead to emerging application opportunities such as daytime radiative cooling [16] and night-time photovoltaics generation [17]. These new application areas created a demand for SPhP characterisation methods, which would allow for accurate evaluation of the energy spectrum, polarisation, lifetime and other properties of SPhP excitations in supporting nanostructures.…”