Macroscopically Aligned Carbon Nanotubes as a Refractory Platform for Hyperbolic Thermal Emitters

Abstract

Refractory nanophotonics, or nanophotonics at high temperatures, can revolutionize many applications, including data storage and waste heat recovery. In particular, nanophotonic devices made from hyperbolic materials are promising due to their nearly infinite photonic density of states (PDOS). However, it is challenging to achieve a prominent PDOS in existing refractory hyperbolic materials, especially in a broad spectral range. Here, we demonstrate that macroscopic films and architectures of aligned carbon nanotubes work as excellent refractory hyperbolic materials. We found that aligned carbon nanotubes are thermally stable up to $1600^{\circ }$C and exhibit extreme anisotropy - metallic in one direction and insulating in the other two directions. Such extreme anisotropy makes this system a hyperbolic material with an exceptionally large PDOS over a broadband spectrum range (longer than $4.3\mu$m) in the midinfrared, exhibiting strong resonances in deeply sub-wavelength-sized cavities. We observed polarized, spectrally selective thermal emission from aligned carbon nanotube films as well as indefinite cavities of aligned carbon nanotubes with volume as small as $\sim {\lambda }^3/700$ operating at $700^{\circ }$C . These experiments suggest that aligned carbon nanotubes possess naturally large PDOS that leads to thermal photon densities enhanced by over two orders of magnitude, making them a promising refractory nanophotonics platform.

arXiv comment12 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Controlling thermal emission with metasurfaces and its applications
• One-directional thermal transport in densely aligned single-wall carbon nanotube films
• Terahertz Excitonics in Carbon Nanotubes: Exciton Autoionization and Multiplication
• Multiple Tunable Hyperbolic Resonances in Broadband Infrared Carbon-Nanotube Metamaterials
• Giant Terahertz Polarization Rotation in Ultrathin Films of Aligned Carbon Nanotubes
• Collective Excitations and Optical Response of Ultrathin Carbon Nanotube Films
• Near-unity light-matter interaction in mid-infrared van der Waals nanocavities
• Electrically Driven Hyperbolic Nanophotonic Resonators as High Speed, Spectrally Selective Thermal Radiators
• Controlled Exciton-Plasmon Coupling in a Mixture of Ultrathin Periodically Aligned Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Arrays
• Macroscopically Self-Aligned and Chiralized Carbon Nanotubes: From Filtration to Innovation
• Confinement-Induced Nonlocality and Casimir Force in Transdimensional Systems
• Anisotropic Photon Emission Enhancement near Carbon Nanotube Metasurfaces