Heat meets light on the nanoscale

Abstract

We discuss the state-of-the-art and remaining challenges in the fundamental understanding and technology development for controlling light-matter interactions in nanophotonic environments in and away from thermal equilibrium. The topics covered range from the basics of the thermodynamics of light emission and absorption, to applications in solar-thermal energy generation, thermophotovoltaics, optical refrigeration, personalized cooling technologies, development of coherent incandescent light sources, and spinoptics.

arXiv comment46 pages, 11 figures; to appear in the special issue of Nanophotonics on 'Smart nanophotonics for renewable energy and sustainability' 2016

References in corpus (35)

• Surface Electromagnetic Waves Thermally Excited: Radiative Heat Transfer, Coherence Properties and Casimir Forces Revisited in the Near Field
• Single nanowire solar cells beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit
• Fundamental Limit of Nanophotonic Light-trapping in Solar Cells
• Realization of an all-dielectric zero-index optical metamaterial
• Geometrodynamics of Spinning Light
• Engineering the Photonic Density of States with metamaterials
• Near-field heat transfer in a scanning thermal microscope
• Towards a black body for near-field thermal radiation
• Light-matter interaction in a microcavity-controlled graphene transistor
• Does a Surface Polariton Have Spin?
• Coriolis Effect in Optics: Unified Geometric Phase and Spin-Hall Effect
• Plasmonic materials for energy: from physics to applications
• Bright visible light emission from graphene
• Fundamental limit of light trapping in grating structures
• Thermal Hyperbolic Metamaterials
• Electronic modulation of infrared emissivity in graphene plasmonic resonators
• High temperature epsilon-near-zero and epsilon-near-pole metamaterial emitters for thermophotovoltaics
• A mesoscopic description of radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale
• Tunable Large Resonant Absorption in a Mid-IR Graphene Salisbury Screen
• Super-Planckian Near-Field Thermal Emission with Phonon-Polaritonic Hyperbolic Metamaterials
• High-Field Electrical and Thermal Transport in Suspended Graphene
• Fundamental limits for non-contact transfers between two bodies
• Laser cooling of solids
• The effectiveness of thin films in lieu of hyperbolic metamaterials in the near field
• On conversion of luminescence into absorption and the van Roosbroeck-Shockley relation
• Spectrally and Spatially Configurable Superlenses for Optoplasmonic Nanocircuits
• Enhancement and tunability of near-field radiative heat transfer mediated by surface plasmon polaritons in thin plasmonic films
• Q-factor and emission pattern control of the WG modes in notched microdisk resonators
• Exciton-polaritons gas as a nonequilibrium coolant
• Hyperbolic blackbody
• Quasicrystals: Making invisible materials
• Coherence properties of infrared thermal emission from heated metallic nanowires
• Polarized thermal emission by thin metal wires
• Entropy density and entropy flux in near-field thermal radiation
• Selective Radiative Heating of Nanostructures Using Hyperbolic Metamaterials

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Losses in plasmonics: from mitigating energy dissipation to embracing loss-enabled functionalities
• Entropic and Near-Field Improvements of Thermoradiative Cells
• Incandescent temporal metamaterials
• Broadband near-unidirectional absorption enabled by phonon-polariton resonances in SiC micropyramid arrays
• Spatial profiles of photon chemical potential in near-field thermophotovoltaic cells
• Phonon-polariton mediated thermal radiation and heat transfer among molecules and macroscopic bodies: nonlocal electromagnetic response at mesoscopic scales
• Computational study of III-V direct-gap semiconductors for thermoradiative cell applications
• Radiative heat transfer as a Landauer-Büttiker problem