Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer between Plasmonic Nanostructures

Sammanfattning: Radiative heat transfer (RHT) due to coupled electromagnetic near field scan significantly exceed that dictated by Planck’s law. Understanding such phenomenon is not only of fundamental scientific interest, but also relevant to a broad range of applications especially connected to nanotechnologies.This dissertation elaborates, through a scattering approach based on the rigorous coupled wave analysis method, how plasmonic nanostructures can tame the near-field RHT between two bodies. The transmission-factor spectra are corroborated by photonic band diagrams computed using a finite element method. The main work begins by showing that the phenomenon of spoofsurface plasmon polariton (SSPP) guided on grooved metal surfaces can play a similar role as surface phonon polariton in enhancing the RHT between two closely placed plates. Since dispersions of SSPPs especially their resonance frequencies can be engineered through geometrical surface profiling,one has great freedom in tailoring spectral properties of near-field RHT. Further enhancement of RHT can be achieved through techniques like filling of dielectrics in grooves or deploying supercells. A thorough study of RHT betweentwo 1D or 2D grooved metal plates confirms super-Planckian RHT at near-field limit, with 2D grooved metal plates exhibiting a superior frequency selectivity. We also present RHT with a more exotic type of plasmonic nanostructures consisting of profile-patterned hyperbolic metamaterial arrays, and show that with such plasmonic nanostructures one can achieve an ultrabroadband super-Planckian RHT.