arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Philippe Ben-Abdallah.
We demonstrate the possibility to efficiently split the near-field heat flux exchanged between graphene nano-disks by tuning their doping. This result paves the way for the developement of an active control of propagation directions for heat fluxes exchanged in near-field throughout integrated nanostructures networks.
The transport of heat mediated by thermal photons in hyperbolic multilayer metamaterials is studied using the fluctuational electrodynamics theory. We demonstrate that in comparison to bulk materials the flux inside layered hyperbolic materials can be transported at much longer distances, making these media very promising for thermal management and for near-field energy harvesting.
The ability to control electric currents in solids using diodes and transistors is undoubtedly at the origin of the main developments in modern electronics which have revolutionized the daily life in the second half of 20th century. Surprisingly, until the year 2000 no thermal counterpart for such a control had been proposed. Since then, based on pioneering works on the control of phononic heat currents new devices were proposed which allow for the control of heat fluxes carried by photons rather than phonons or electrons. The goal of the present paper is to summarize the main advances achieved recently in the field of thermal energy control with photons.
Absorption and scattering of electromagnetic waves by dielectric media are of fundamental importance in many branches of physics. In this Letter we analytically derived the ultimate upper limits for the absorbed and scattered powers by any system of optical resonators in mutual interaction. We show that these bounds depend only on the geometric configuration given an incident field. We give the conditions to fullfill to reach these limits paving so a way for a rational design of optimal metamaterials.
The blackbody theory is revisited in the case of thermal electromagnetic fields inside uniaxial anisotropic media in thermal equilibrium with a heat bath. When these media are hyperbolic, we show that the spectral energy density of these fields radically differs from that predicted by Planck's blackbody theory. We demonstrate that the maximum of their spectral energy density is shifted towards frequencies smaller than Wien's frequency making these media apparently colder. Finally, we derive Stefan-Boltzmann's law for hyperbolic media which becomes a quadratic function of the heat bath temperature.
We predict the existence of a thermal bistability in many-body systems out of thermal equilibrium which exchange heat by thermal radiation using insulator-metal transition (IMT) materials. We propose a writing-reading procedure and demonstrate the possibility to exploit the thermal bistability to make a volatile thermal memory. We show that this thermal memory can be used to store heat and thermal information (via an encoding temperature) for arbitrary long times. The radiative thermal bistability could find broad applications in the domains of thermal management, information processing and energy storage.
The cooperative electromagnetic interactions between discrete resonators have been widely used to modify the optical properties of metamaterials. Here we propose a general evolutionary approach for engineering these interactions in arbitrary networks of resonators. To illustrate the performances of this approach, we designed by genetic algorithm, an almost perfect broadband absorber in the visible range made with a simple binary array of metallic nanoparticles.
We analyze how a probing particle modifies the infrared electromagnetic near field of a sample. The particle, described by electric and magnetic polarizabilities, represents the tip of an apertureless scanning optical near-field microscope (SNOM). We show that the interaction with the sample can be accounted for by ascribing to the particle dressed polarizabilities that combine the effects of image dipoles with retardation. When calculated from these polarizabilities, the SNOM signal depends only on the fields without the perturbing tip. If the studied surface is not illuminated by an external source but heated instead, the signal is closely related to the projected electromagnetic local density of states (EM-LDOS). Our calculations provide the link between the measured far-field spectra and the sample's optical properties.We also analyze the case where the probing particle is hotter than the sample and evaluate the impact of the dressed polarizabilities on near-field radiative heat transfer. We show that such a heated probe above a surface performs a surface spectroscopy, in the sense that the spectrum of the heat current is closely related to the local electromagnetic density of states. The calculations agree well with available experimental data.
Using a block of three separated solid elements, a thermal source and drain together with a gate made of an insulator-metal transition material exchanging near-field thermal radiation, we introduce a nanoscale analog of a field-effect transistor which is able to control the flow of heat exchanged by evanescent thermal photons between two bodies. By changing the gate temperature around its critical value, the heat flux exchanged between the hot body (source) and the cold body (drain) can be reversibly switched, amplified, and modulated by a tiny action on the gate. Such a device could find important applications in the domain of nanoscale thermal management and it opens up new perspectives concerning the development of contactless thermal circuits intended for information processing using the photon current rather than the electric current.
We introduce a thermal antenna which can be actively switched by phase transition. The source makes use of periodically patterned vanadium dioxide, a metal-insulator phase transition material which supports a surface phonon-polariton (SPP) in the infrared range in its crystalline phase. Using electrodes properly registred with respect to the pattern, the phase transition of VO2 can be localy triggered within few microseconds and the SPP can be diffracted making the thermal emission highly directionnal. This switchable antenna could find broad applications in the domain of active thermal coatings or in those of infrared spectroscopy and sensing.
A thermal diode transports heat mainly in one preferential direction rather than in the opposite direction. This behavior is generally due to the non-linear dependence of certain physical properties with respect to the temperature. Here we introduce a radiative thermal diode which rectifies heat transport thanks to the phase transitions of materials. Rectification coefficients greater than 70% and up to 90% are shown, even for small temperature differences. This result could have important applications in the development of futur contactless thermal circuits or in the conception of radiative coatings for thermal management.
A general fluctuational-electrodynamic theory is developed to investigate radiative heat exchanges between objects which are assumed small compared with their thermal wavelength (dipolar approximation) in N-body systems immersed in a thermal bath. This theoretical framework is applied to study the dynamic of heating/cooling of three-body systems. We show that many-body interactions allow to tailor the temperature field distribution and to drastically change the time scale of thermal relaxation processes.
Heat-transport mechanism mediated by near-field interactions in plasmonic nanostructures networks is shown to be analogous to a generalized random-walk process. Existence of superdiffusive regimes is demonstrated both in linear ordered chains and in three dimensional random networks by analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the corresponding probability distribution function. We show that the spread of heat in these networks is described by a type of Lévy flight. The presence of such anomalous heat transport regimes in plasmonic networks opens the way to the design of a new generation of composite materials able to transport heat faster than the normal diffusion process in solids.
We study super-Planckian near-field heat exchanges for multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials using exact S-matrix calculations. We investigate heat exchanges between two multilayer hyperbolic metamaterial structures. We show that the super- Planckian emission of such metamaterials can either come from the presence of surface phonon-polaritons modes or from a continuum of hyperbolic modes depending on the choice of composite materials as well as the structural configuration.
Hyperbolic materials are artificially engineered composite media which allow innovative optical properties that could lead to significant advances in numerous breakthrough technologies. However, these properties are conventionally studied by means of an effective medium theory. But this one is specifically well adapted to describe the optical behaviour of composite materials in the far field region. Here, we adress the question of the validity of such an approach in the near field region. We show that the presence of localized modes such as resonant surface waves drastically limits the validity of the effective description and requires revisiting the concept of homogenization in near-field. In particular we demonstrate from exact calculations that one can find surface modes in spectral regions where the effective medium theory predicts hyperbolic modes only. Hence, the presence of surface modes which are not accounted for in the effective medium theory can lead to physical misinterpretations in the description of hyperbolic materials and their related properties.
It is known that the near-field spectrum of the local density of states of the electromagnetic field above a SiC/air interface displays an intense narrow peak due to the presence of a surface polariton. It has been recently shown that this surface wave can be strongly coupled with the sheet plasmon of graphene in graphene-SiC heterosystems. Here, we explore the interplay between these two phenomena and demonstrate that the spectrum of the electromagnetic local density of states in these systems presents two peaks whose position depends dramatically both on the distance to the interface and on the chemical potential of graphene. This paves the way towards the active control of the local density of states.
Thermophotovoltaic devices are energy-conversion systems generating an electric current from the thermal photons radiated by a hot body. In far field, the efficiency of these systems is limited by the thermodynamic Schockley-Queisser limit corresponding to the case where the source is a black body. On the other hand, in near field, the heat flux which can be transferred to a photovoltaic cell can be several orders of magnitude larger because of the contribution of evanescent photons. This is particularly true when the source supports surface polaritons. Unfortunately, in the infrared where these systems operate, the mismatch between the surface-mode frequency and the semiconductor gap reduces drastically the potential of this technology. Here we show that graphene-based hybrid photovoltaic cells can significantly enhance the generated power paving the way to a promising technology for an intensive production of electricity from waste heat.
We present an exact calculation of the coherent thermal conductance in a 1-D multilayer photonic crystals (PC) using the S-matrix method. In particular, we study the thermal conductance in a bilayer structure of slabs of Si/vacuum or Al$_2$O$_3$/vacuum by means of the exact expression for the radiative heat flux. We compare our results with results obtained in previous works. Our results show that the coupling of surface modes as well as material losses play a fundamental role in the definition of the thermal conductance of PCs.