Proximity Effects in Radiative Transfer

Abstract

Though the dependence of near-field radiative transfer on the gap between two planar objects is well understood, that between curved objects is still unclear. We show, based on the analysis of the surface polariton mediated radiative transfer between two spheres of equal radii $R$ and minimum gap $d$, that the near--field radiative transfer scales as $R/d$ as $d/R\to 0$ and as $\ln (R/d)$ for larger values of $d/R$ up to the far--field limit. We propose a modified form of the proximity approximation to predict near--field radiative transfer between curved objects from simulations of radiative transfer between planar surfaces.

5 journal pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Near-field radiative heat transfer between a sphere and a substrate
• Resonant photon tunneling enhancement of the radiative heat transfer
• The Casimir effect in the nanoworld

Cited by in corpus (2)

• A Green's function formalism of energy and momentum transfer in fluctuational electrodynamics
• A thermokinetic approach to radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale