Nanoplasmonics Mediated Radiative Thermal Transport in Near- and Far-Fields

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Thermal radiation plays an important role in many fields, such as heat transfer, energy conversion, optics and photonics, and remote sensing. When the gap size between objects exchanging energy by radiation is very small, the radiative heat transfer can be dramatically enhanced beyond what is usually predicted by theory. The proposed research will significantly advance the basic understanding of thermal emission at the nanoscale and facilitate the development of new techniques for controlling thermal radiation. This project integrates research and education via various outreach activities to K-12 students and general public as well as dissemination of simulation tools. Multiple open-source codes for directly calculating thermal radiation at the nanoscale is to be developed and disseminated. The educational focus is underserved high school students in the Pittsburgh area and undergraduate and graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University. A broader community of motivated scholars in science and engineering will be reached through various workshops held in Pennsylvania. The main objective of this project is to control the extreme spectral and directional characteristics of thermal radiation based on a bottom-up method using individual coherent nanoemitters as fundamental elements. The current effort delves deeply into the unique thermal emission properties of a nanoemitter, and utilizes the nanoemitters as basic building blocks to create a new type of macroscopic perfect thermal emitting surface, which can work in both near- and far-field modes. The aim is to develop a new theory to understand the fundamental limit of thermal emission from an arbitrary nanoscale plasmonic structure. The overall thermal radiation from arrays of nanoscale plasmonic structures in both near- and far-fields will also be studied.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.