Near-field radiative heat transfer in N-body systems

直到本世纪头十年，人们只对两个物体之间的近场热交换进行了理论和实验研究，而对于由相互作用的不同物体组成的系统中的能量传输机制还没有人去探索，甚至超出了Polder和van Hove在70年代初提出的描述两体热交换的涨落电动力学理论的范围。2011年，我们引入了第一个理论框架，在小物体的近似下处理多体系统中的近场热交换。这一结果是对最初在光学中引入的波动偶极子耦合偶极子理论的推广。特别地，导出了相互作用N体系统中辐射热输运的Meir-Wgreen-Landauer型公式。将这一理论推广到宏观物体，揭示了纯多体效应的存在，如热光子隧穿增强，这使得我们可以利用插入在近场相互作用中的两个物体之间的无源中继系统，将近场效应扩展到更大的分离距离。所有这些开创性的工作为研究近场相互作用主导能量传输的复杂等离子体网络中的热交换物理开辟了道路。但是，到目前为止，这一物理学在很大程度上仍未得到探索。

Until the 2000s only near-field heat exchanges between two objects had been theoretically and experimentally investigated and the mechanisms for energy transport in systems composed of a collection of different objects in mutual interaction was still unexplored and even out of range of the fluctuational electrodynamic theory introduced by Polder and van Hove in the beginning of 70s describing two-body heat exchanges. In 2011, we have introduced the first theoretical framework to deal with near-field heat exchanges in many-body systems in the approximation of small objects. This result consists in a generalization of the coupled dipole theory initially introduced in optics for fluctuating dipoles. In particular, a Meir-Wingreen-Landauer-type formula for the radiative heat transport in interacting N-body systems has been derived. A generalization of this theory to macroscopic objects has revealed the existence of purely many-body effects such as thermal photon tunneling enhancement which allows us to extend the near-field effects to larger separation distances using a passive relay system intercalated between two bodies in near-field interaction. All these pioneer works have opened the way to study the physics of heat exchanges in more or less complex plasmonic networks in regimes where near-field interactions are dominating the energy transport. But, to date this physics remains largely unexplored.