Far-field heat transfer and monochromatic thermal currents in a cylindrical nonreciprocal cavity

Abstract

Breaking Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation yields new opportunities in one-way radiative thermal transport and circuitry. We investigate its consequences in the far-field regime in cylindrical cavities, by employing a specular ray-tracing algorithm. At thermal equilibrium, we show that violation of Kirchhoff's law yields non-vanishing heat rectification coefficients within different sections of the cavity, which can be tuned for perfect rectification and circulation, while internal monochromatic currents vanish due to the intrinsic coupling between emission and absorption at specular surfaces. This constraint is lifted under nonequilibrium conditions, where rotational heat fluxes within the cavity can be precisely controlled by appropriately combining reciprocal and nonreciprocal materials. These findings open new avenues for thermal management and provide design principles for nonreciprocal photonic devices.

7 pages with 4 figures and appendix of 2 pages and 1 figure

References in corpus (6)

• Violating Kirchhoff's Law of Thermal Radiation in Semitransparent Structures
• Nonreciprocal radiative heat transfer between two planar bodies
• Observation of Strong Nonreciprocal Thermal Emission
• Polarimetric analysis of thermal emission from both reciprocal and nonreciprocal materials using fluctuational electrodynamics
• Thermodynamic performance bounds for radiative heat engines
• On persistent energy currents at equilibrium in non-reciprocal systems