Selective thermal emitters are materials which emit in narrow wavelength bands, unlike blackbody emitters which emit uniformly over all wavelengths. Materials with tailored emission/absorption characteristics can be useful for applications in energy conversion, energy conservation, chemical, and bio-chemical sensing. In this paper, we show that thin films of polar dielectric materials can act as selective emitters in two frequency bands on either side of the restrahlen band(s) of the polar material due to multiple reflections within the thin films.

We have designed and fabricated bi-material microcantilevers with low conductance by minimizing the width and thickness of the cantilevers while keeping them suitable for detection with an optical deflection technique. The conductance of a cantilever is determined experimentally to be 330 6 20 nWK À1. Using this cantilever, we have measured less than 1 pW of heat flow through the cantilever. The thermal noise-limited resolution of the cantilever is expected to be %50 fW. Such cantilevers give us additional tools to probe thermal transport through nanostructures, especially through single molecules where picowatt-level sensitivity is necessary. V

Thermal conductance measurements are performed on individual polystyrene nanowires using a novel measurement technique in which the wires are suspended between two bi-material microcantilever sensors. The nanowires are fabricated via electrospinning process. Thermal conductivity of the nanowire samples is found to be between 6.6 and 14.4 W m(-1) K(-1) depending on sample, a significant increase above typical bulk conductivity values for polystyrene. The high strain rates characteristic of electrospinning are believed to lead to alignment of molecular polymer chains, and hence the increase in thermal conductivity, along the axis of the nanowire.

Low thermal conductance bi-material microcantilevers are fabricated with a pad area near the free end to accommodate a focused laser spot. A pair of such cantilevers are proposed as a configuration for measuring thermal conductance of a nanostructure suspended between the two. We determine the resolution of such a device by measuring the stray conductance it would detect in the absence of any nanostructure. Stray conductance, primarily due to optical coupling, is measured for cantilevers with varying pad size and found to be as low as 0.05 nW K(-1), with cantilevers with larger pad size yielding the smallest stray conductance.

We have developed a microcantilever-based technique for measurement of heat conduction through individual nanowires. We fabricated silicon nitride cantilevers with nominal dimensions of length 100 μm, width 2–6 μm, and thickness 130 nm. Cantilever chips are designed with multiple cantilevers spaced at varying distances. With a reflective aluminum coating of optimized thickness, these bimaterial cantilevers can be used as ultrasensitive thermal sensors capable of measuring very small heat flux through a nanostructure fixed between two cantilevers. The ultrasensitive bimaterial cantilevers designed in this work are not limited to heat conduction measurements, but will also be useful for measuring near-field radiative heat transfer between a sphere, attached to the tip of the cantilever, and a flat plate.