Enhancement and active mediation of near-field radiative heat transfer through multiple nonreciprocal graphene surface plasmons

Abstract

Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterparts of three-dimensional metamaterials, have recently attracted much attention due to their interesting properties, such as negative refraction, hyperbolic dispersion, and the ability to manipulate the evanescent spectrum. In this work, we propose a theoretical model for near-field radiative heat transfer between two multilayered systems consisting of anisotropic metasurfaces. The choice of metasurface is graphene, with an adjustable drift current, since this provides an ideal platform to support a high density of modes around the plasmon frequency. In this configuration, multiple nonreciprocal surface plasmon polaritons are excited, providing a strong way for near-field energy transport. The resulting heat transfer, assisted by the graphene's multilayered structure and with a high drift-current velocity, is more than 36 times stronger than that of a graphene monolayer structure without a drift current for the same vacuum gap. By adjusting the vacuum gap and the thickness of a dielectric spacer, this enhanced effect can be modulated over a large range, and can even turn into a suppression. Our findings provide a powerful way to enhance and regulate energy transport, and in turn, open up a way to enrich the moir\'e physics inherent to the anisotropic optical properties of a metasurface.