Near-field heat transfer between graphene/hBN multilayers

Abstract

We study the radiative heat transfer between multilayer structures made by a periodic repetition of a graphene sheet and a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) slab. Surface plasmons in a monolayer graphene can couple with a hyperbolic phonon polaritons in a single hBN film to form hybrid polaritons that can assist photon tunneling. For periodic multilayer graphene/hBN structures, the stacked metallic/dielectric array can give rise to a further effective hyperbolic behavior, in addition to the intrinsic natural hyperbolic behavior of hBN. The effective hyperbolicity can enable more hyperbolic polaritons that enhance the photon tunneling and hence the near-field heat transfer. However, the hybrid polaritons on the surface, i.e. surface plasmon-phonon polaritons, dominate the near-field heat transfer between multilayer structures when the topmost layer is graphene. The effective hyperbolic regions can be well predicted by the effective medium theory (EMT), thought EMT fails to capture the hybrid surface polaritons and results in a heat transfer rate much lower compared to the exact calculation. The chemical potential of the graphene sheets can be tuned through electrical gating and results in an additional modulation of the heat transfer. We found that the near-field heat transfer between multilayer structure does not increase monotonously with the number of layer in the stack, which provides a way to control the heat transfer rate by the number of graphene layers in the multilayer structure. The results may benefit the applications of near-field energy harvesting and radiative cooling based on hybrid polaritons in two-dimensional materials.

10 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• Optical properties of graphene
• Sub-diffractional, volume-confined polaritons in a natural hyperbolic material: hexagonal boron nitride
• Subdiffractional focusing and guiding of polaritonic rays in a natural hyperbolic material
• Tunable light-matter interaction and the role of hyperbolicity in graphene-hBN system
• Radiative heat transfer between metallic gratings using adaptive spatial resolution
• Near-field heat transfer between multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials
• Strong thermal and electrostatic manipulation of the Casimir force in graphene multilayers

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Controlling thermal emission with metasurfaces and its applications
• Graphene-based thermal repeater
• Magnetically tunable multi-band near-field radiative heat transfer between two graphene sheets
• Polariton Topological Transition Effects on Radiative Heat Transfer
• Dynamical Polarizability of Graphene with Spatial Dispersion
• Nonreciprocal radiative heat transfer between two planar bodies
• Manipulating coherence of near-field thermal radiation in time-modulated systems
• The Quantum Confinement Effect on the Spectrum of Near-Field Thermal Radiation by Quantum Dots
• Near-field radiative heat transfer between rough surfaces modeled using effective media with gradient distribution of dielectric function
• Moderate-temperature near-field thermophotovoltaic systems with thin-film InSb cells
• High Resolution Measurement of Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer enabled by Nanomechanical Resonators