VO ₂ Substrate Effect on the Thermal Rectification of a Far-Field Radiative Diode

Thermal-Wave Diode

“…Nonlinear heat transport based on the metal-insulator transition of materials [1] and the coupling of dissimilar lattices [2][3][4][5] has recently attracted great interest for the control of conductive and radiative heat currents [6][7][8][9][10]. This phenomenon is observed in materials with thermal and optical properties depending on temperature, which has been exploited to conceive and develop thermal diodes [6,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17], thermal transistors [18][19][20][21], thermal memories [22,23], and thermal memristors [24,25] that make possible the processing of information via thermal electrons, phonons, and photons. The operation of these thermal devices is, however, usually limited temperatures in which the material properties exhibit significant changes with temperature.…”

“…L041002-1 © 2021 American Physical Society backward bias. In contrast to steady-state thermal diodes, which typically operate with large temperature gradients [16,17], this thermal-wave diode functions with relatively small heat currents modulated in frequency.…”

Smart thermal management with near-field thermal radiation

“…A widely MIT material is vanadium dioxide (VO 2 ) which undergoes its phase transition at T c ≈ 340 K [35,36]. Thanks to this transition rectification coefficients higher than 70% have been predicted and highlighted in far-field regime [27,37,38] with a temperature bias ∆T < 50 K and values around 90% have been observed in near-field regime [29,[39][40][41]. Furthermore, materials undergoing a normal-metal-superconductor transition [42][43][44][45][46] have also been considered to design radiative thermal rectifiers operating at cryogenic temperatures with similarly good performances.…”

Radiative thermal rectification in many-body systems

“…This thermal rectification exploits the thermal dependence of optical properties of the materials in interaction [79][80][81][82], which naturally breaks the symmetry in the heat transport when the sign of the temperature gradient between the two solids is changed. In addition, a large asymmetry in the heat transport was reported in systems made with materials undergoing a phase change, such as metal-insulator transition materials [83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96] and normal metal-superconductor transition materials [97][98][99]. However, this strong rectification occurs only close to the critical temperature of these materials.…”