Scattering approach to near-field radiative heat transfer

Abstract

We formulate the problem of near-field radiative heat transfer as an effective quantum scattering theory for excitations of the matter. Built from the same ingredients as the semiclassical fluctuational electrodynamics, the standard tool to handle this problem, our construction makes manifest its relation to the Landauer-Büttiker scattering framework, which appears only implicitly in the fluctuational electrodynamics. We show how to construct the scattering matrix for the matter excitations and give a general expression for the energy current in terms of this scattering matrix. We show that the energy current has an important non-dissipative contribution that can dominate the finite-frequency noise while being absent in the average current. Our construction provides a unified description of near-field radiative heat transfer in diverse physical systems.

References in corpus (10)

• Single-mode heat conduction by photons
• Colloquium: Quantum heat transport in condensed matter systems
• Effects of spatial dispersion in near-field radiative heat transfer between two parallel metallic surfaces
• Mesoscopic photon heat transistor
• Near-field induction heating of metallic nanoparticles due to infrared magnetic dipole contribution
• Photon heat transport in low-dimensional nanostructures
• Near field versus far field in radiative heat transfer between two-dimensional metals
• Signature of resonant modes in radiative heat current noise spectrum
• Strong slowing down of the thermalization process of solids interacting in extreme near-field regime
• Radiative heat transfer as a Landauer-Büttiker problem