Raphael St-Gelais (Cornell Nanophotonics Group)
Radiative heat transfer between objects separated by subwavelength distances offers unprecedented opportunities for energy generation and heat flow control applications. In the optical near-field, heat transfer can occur through evanescent coupling of thermally excited infrared surface resonances (i.e., plasmonic or phononic surface resonances). This heat transport mechanism can overcome the classical far-field radiation limit (i.e., Stefan-Boltzmann law) by several orders of magnitude, while occurring over a quasi-monochromatic frequency range. These unique characteristics could enable new exciting applications, such as near-field thermophotovolatic energy generation, or active heat flow control devices such as thermal rectifiers and thermal transistors. I will review these prospective applications and present our recent work [1], in which we achieved the first experimental demonstration of near-field radiative heat transfer between integrated nanostructures.
[1] Demonstration of Strong Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer between Integrated Nanostructures, Raphael St-Gelais, Biswajeet Guha, Linxiao Zhu, Shanhui Fan, and Michal Lipson, Nano Letters 2014 14 (12), 6971-6975
Cette conférence est présentée par le RQMP Versant Nord du Département de physique de l'Université de Montréal et le Département de génie physique de Polytechnique Montréal.
