Ultrafast modulation of near-field heat transfer with tunable metamaterials

Abstract

We propose a mechanism of active near-field heat transfer modulation relying on externally tunable metamaterials. A large modulation effect is observed and can be explained by the coupling of surface modes, which is dramatically varied in the presence of controllable magnetoelectric coupling in metamaterials. We finally discuss how a practical picosecond-scale thermal modulator can be made. This modulator allows manipulating nanoscale heat flux in an ultrafast and noncontact (by optical means) manner.

11 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Magnetic metamaterials at telecommunication and visible frequencies
• Broadband super-Planckian thermal emission from hyperbolic metamaterials
• Near-field radiative heat transfer between a sphere and a substrate
• Chiral metamaterials: retrieval of the effective parameters with and without substrate

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Magnetically tunable multi-band near-field radiative heat transfer between two graphene sheets
• The Quantum Confinement Effect on the Spectrum of Near-Field Thermal Radiation by Quantum Dots