Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Near-field thermal radiation holds promise for high-throughput thermophotovoltaic devices, nanomanufacturing, thermal imaging, local heat removal, and vacuum thermal rectifiers, especially when the vacuum gap separating the structures is reduced to submicron distances. In addition to bulk materials that support surface plasmon polaritons or surface phonon polaritons, various micro/nanostructured materials have been considered for enhancing the radiative heat flux, such as doped silicon nanowires and nanoholes, carbon nanotubes, multilayers, gratings, and graphene sheets. This presentation will summarize some of our recent theoretical studies on photon tunneling in nanostructures considering metameterials, metasurfaces, and plasmonic graphene sheets. Recent measurements of near-field thermal radiation between 10 mm x 10 mm doped silicon plates separated at distances below 500 nm will also be presented.