Radiative heat transfer mediated by topological phonon polaritons in a family of quasiperiodic nanoparticle chains

Abstract

Topological phonon polaritons (TPhPs) are localized boundary modes arising from the combination of topological photonics and phonon polaritons in micro/nanostructures made of polar dielectrics, which are capable of mediating long-range radiative heat transfer and infrared sensing in a robust manner. This work shows TPhPs can be sustained in a family of one-dimensional quasiperiodic silicon carbide nanoparticle (NP) chains, and can significantly improve radiative heat transfer for these arrays. This family of 1D quasiperiodic lattices is a continuous interpolation between the two paradigmatic limits, viz., the off-diagonal Aubry-André-Harper (AAH) chain and the Fibonacci chain. For different interpolation parameters τ, the band structures are calculated with respect to the modulation phase ϕ as the wavenumber in a synthetic dimension, where a series of gaps and midgap edge states can be observed. These edge states are shown to be topologically protected by applying the gap-labeling theorem and the principle of bulk-boundary correspondence. By means of many-body radiative heat transfer theory for a group of electric dipoles, it is shown quasiperiodicity and topological property can have an important impact on radiative heat transfer. These results can give useful insights on the interplay among topological order, long-range quasiperiodic order, near-field electromagnetic interactions and radiative heat transfer.