DFG final report for the Walter Benjamin Programme : Stationary and time-dependent radiative heat transfer with cylindrical waveguides

Abstract

Following the progress in development of micro- and nanodevices, the physics of thermal radiation at these small length scales has been studied intensively in the current century. It requires more sophisticated theories and obeys different laws compared to radiative heat exchange at large scales, for example, between the Sun and the Earth. Yet main questions remain similar: How to improve the efficiency of radiative heat transfer, suppress or enhance the cooling rate of an object, thermally isolate a part of a system? Another important and only recently emerged research area concerns systems subject to nonstationary conditions, such as time-dependent temperatures or material properties of the objects, where the heat fluxes can depend on time and show fundamentally different properties compared to the stationary case. In this project, we addressed the aforementioned questions for the stationary heat transfer between two nanoparticles placed close to a nanowire or inside a cylindrical cavity. In the former case, the heat transfer was shown to decay logarithmically with the interparticle distance, thus greatly outperforming the transfer without an additional object or in the presence of objects of other shapes. In the latter case, a cylindrical cavity can largely suppress or resonantly enhance the heat flow, depending on its radius. If we consider that one particle starts to radiate at a certain time, the heat flux to another one is no longer stationary, which requires an extension of the existing theoretical formalisms. Making this extension, we derived a formula for the time-dependent flux, numerically demonstrating it for two isolated nanoparticles, where picosecond-scale oscillatory exponential relaxation to the stationary value was observed. In addition to the aforementioned studies of radiative heat flow through vacuum, we also developed a theory for computing this flow inside media, and derived the corresponding thermal conductivity tensor for an arbitrary object. In agreement with recent experiments, it was found that the radiative part of conductivity of a nanosheet can be larger compared to the phononic part due to the electromagnetic surface waves contribution. The developed theoretical frameworks can be used to further advance the subject area, while the found results may be relevant for practical applications, such as thermal microscopy, thermal logic, or nanomedicine.