Thin-film radiative thermal diode with large rectification

Abstract

We propose a mechanism to substantially rectify radiative heat flow by matching thin films of metal-to-insulator transition materials and polar dielectrics in the electromagnetic near field. By leveraging the distinct scaling behaviors of the local density of states with film thickness for metals and insulators, we theoretically achieve rectification ratios over 140-a 10-fold improvement over the state of the art-with nanofilms of vanadium dioxide and cubic boron nitride in the parallel-plane geometry at experimentally feasible gap sizes (~100 nm). Our rational design offers relative ease of fabrication, flexible choice of materials, and robustness against deviations from optimal film thicknesses. We expect this work to facilitate the application of thermal diodes in solid-state thermal circuits and energy conversion devices.

References in corpus (13)

• Phononics: Manipulating heat flow with electronic analogs and beyond
• Surface Electromagnetic Waves Thermally Excited: Radiative Heat Transfer, Coherence Properties and Casimir Forces Revisited in the Near Field
• Broadband super-Planckian thermal emission from hyperbolic metamaterials
• Rectification of electronic heat current by a hybrid thermal diode
• Reciprocity in reflection and transmission: what is a "phonon diode"?
• A mesoscopic description of radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale
• A near-field radiative heat transfer device
• The effectiveness of thin films in lieu of hyperbolic metamaterials in the near field
• Radiative Thermal Rectification between SiC and SiO2
• Thermal heat radiation, near-field energy density and near-field radiative heat transfer of coated materials
• Thermal rectification and spin-spin coupling of non-reciprocal localized and surface modes
• Radiative Thermal Diode Mediated by Nonreciprocal Graphene Plasmons Waveguides
• Photonic thermal diode enabled by surface polariton coupling in nanostructures

Cited by in corpus (10)

• High-rectification near-field radiative thermal diode using Weyl semimetals
• Time-modulated near-field radiative heat transfer
• Giant radiative thermal rectification using an intrinsic semiconductor film
• Radiative thermal diode via hyperbolic metamaterials
• Isotope effect on radiative thermal transport
• Fundamental limit to the rectification of near-field heat flow: The potential of intrinsic semiconductor films
• Performance improvement of three-body radiative diode driven by graphene surface plasmon polaritons
• High-efficiency broadband active metasurfaces via reversible metal electrodeposition
• Multiple magnetoplasmon polaritons of magneto-optical graphene in near-field radiative heat transfer
• Graphene-based enhancement of near-field radiative-heat-transfer rectification