Enhancing Near-Field Heat Transfer in Composite Media: Effects of the Percolation Transition

Abstract

We investigate the near-field heat transfer between a semi-infinite medium and a nanoparticle made of composite materials. We show that, in the effective medium approximation, the heat transfer can be greatly enhanced by considering composite media, being maximal at the percolation transition. Specifically, for titanium inclusions embedded in a polystyrene sphere, this enhancement can be up to thirty times larger than in the case of the corresponding homogeneous titanium sphere. We demonstrate that our findings are robust against material losses, to changes in the shape of inclusions and materials, and apply for different effective medium theories. These results suggest the use of composite media as a new, versatile material platform to enhance, optimize, and tailor near-field heat transfer in nanostructures.

8 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (5)

• Near-field radiative heat transfer between a sphere and a substrate
• Fluctuating surface-current formulation of radiative heat transfer for arbitrary geometries
• Radiative heat transfer between metallic nanoparticles
• Near-field induction heating of metallic nanoparticles due to infrared magnetic dipole contribution
• Near-field radiative heat transfer between closely spaced graphene and amorphous SiO${}_2$