Saturation of radiative heat transfer due to many-body thermalization

Ivan Latella,Riccardo Messina,Svend-Age Biehs,Philippe Ben-Abdallah,J Miguel Rubi

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-65555-3

Abstract

Radiative heat transfer between two bodies saturates at very short separation distances due to the nonlocal optical response of the materials. In this work, we show that the presence of radiative interactions with a third body or external bath can also induce a saturation of the heat transfer, even at separation distances for which the optical response of the materials is purely local. We demonstrate that this saturation mechanism is a direct consequence of a thermalization process resulting from many-body interactions in the system. This effect could have an important impact in the field of nanoscale thermal management of complex systems and in the interpretation of measured signals in thermal metrology at the nanoscale.

Highlights

Radiative heat transfer between two bodies saturates at very short separation distances due to the nonlocal optical response of the materials
It has been shown that the divergence of the heat transfer can be removed at subnanometric separation distances because of the interplay of conductive and radiative heat transfer inside the interacting bodies, which lead to the generation of temperature gradients and in turn to a saturation of the heat flux[14,15]
While we focus on radiative heat transfer, the considered mechanism follows from the general principle of energy balance and it is not unique to thermal radiation

Summary

Introduction

Radiative heat transfer between two bodies saturates at very short separation distances due to the nonlocal optical response of the materials. We show that the presence of radiative interactions with a third body or external bath can induce a saturation of the heat transfer, even at separation distances for which the optical response of the materials is purely local. We demonstrate that this saturation mechanism is a direct consequence of a thermalization process resulting from manybody interactions in the system.

Methods

Conclusion