Thermal excitation of plasmons for near-field thermophotovoltaics

Abstract

The traditional approaches of exciting plasmons consist of using electrons (eg: electron energy loss spectroscopy) or light (Kretchman and Otto geometry) while more recently plasmons have been excited even by single photons. A different approach: thermal excitation of a plasmon resonance at high temperatures using alternate plasmonic media was proposed by S. Molesky et.al., Opt. Exp. 21.101, A96-A110, (2013). Here, we show how the long-standing search for a high temperature narrow band near-field emitter for thermophotovoltaics can be fulfilled by high temperature plasmonics. We also describe how to control Wein's displacement law in the near-field using high temperature epsilon-near-zero metamaterials. Finally, we show that our work opens up an interesting direction of research for the field of slow light: thermal emission control.

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• Thermal excitation of plasmons for near-field thermophotovoltaics

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• Relative merits of Phononics vs. Plasmonics: the energy balance approach
• Thermal excitation of plasmons for near-field thermophotovoltaics
• Material Scaling and Frequency-Selective Enhancement of Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer for Lossy Metals in Two Dimensions via Inverse Design
• Contribution of the acoustic waves to near-field heat transfer
• Thermal graphene metamaterials and epsilon-near-zero high temperature plasmonics
• Overcoming the bottleneck for quantum computations of complex nanophotonic structures: Purcell and FRET calculations using a rigorous mode hybridization method
• Understanding Detailed Balance for an Electron-Radiation System Through Mixed Quantum-Classical Electrodynamics
• Selective Radiative Heating of Nanostructures Using Hyperbolic Metamaterials
• A Selective Metasurface Absorber with An Amorphous Carbon Interlayer for Solar Thermal Applications