Selective radiative heating of nanostructures using hyperbolic metamaterials

Abstract

Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMM) are of great interest due to their ability to break the diffraction limit for imaging and enhance near-field radiative heat transfer. Here we demonstrate that an annular, transparent HMM enables selective heating of a sub-wavelength plasmonic nanowire by controlling the angular mode number of a plasmonic resonance. A nanowire emitter, surrounded by an HMM, appears dark to incoming radiation from an adjacent nanowire emitter unless the second emitter is surrounded by an identical lens such that the wavelength and angular mode of the plasmonic resonance match. Our result can find applications in radiative thermal management.

Review on the Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs in Thermal Emission Engineering

“…Over the past few decades, this approach has evolved to encompass thermal emission engineering, boosting a plethora of groundbreaking developments, including novel thermal effects − and innovative applications. ,− Indeed, spatially nanostructured photonic materials, characterized by geometric features with sizes at or below the wavelength scale, have garnered significant relevance in the area of thermal emission due to their ability to enhance far-field thermal emission performance, , and granting access to near-field thermal properties. , Thus far, practical implementations have mostly relied on metamaterials, − metasurfaces, − photonic crystals, − or subwavelength structures, such as spatial gratings, − cavities, − …”

Heat meets light on the nanoscale

“…Some success in increasing the absorption cross-sections has been achieved by tuning the geometry and material composition of nanoscale emitters to achieve near-degeneracy of several trapped photon modes of different polarization and angular momentum in a narrow spectral range [265,266]. Metamaterial hyperlenses have been theoretically predicted to yield selective absorber heating and, by reciprocity, enhanced light extraction from nanoscale thermal sources into the far field [78,267,268]. It has also been proposed that extraordinarily large absorption cross-sections of nanoscale resonators can be achieved by embedding them into a material with near-zero refractive index [269].…”