Near-field radiative heat transfer in three-body Weyl semimetals.

Abstract

We investigate the near-field radiative heat transfer in a three-body system made of Weyl semimetals. At infinitesimal temperature gradient, the rotation of the middle and the right bodies leads to heat transfer suppression, enabling thermal switching with considerably enhanced heat flux but slightly smaller ratio than two-body system without the middle body, due to stronger cavity surface plasmon polariton modes and their mismatch caused by relative rotation. By further moving the middle body to induce asymmetric cavity sizes, the three-body system can achieve a switching ratio exceeding the two-body counterpart due to asymmetric cavity modes coupling. As the temperature gradient increases to 200 K, the highest switching ratio by optimally tuning the rotation and cavity size asymmetry decreases slightly yet still outperforms the two-body system. Our results provide important understanding of the near-field radiative heat transfer in many-body systems consisting of Weyl semimetals.