A scattering approach to Casimir forces and radiative heat transfer for nanostructured surfaces out of thermal equilibrium

TL;DR

This paper presents an exact scattering-based method to compute Casimir forces and radiative heat transfer between nanostructured surfaces out of thermal equilibrium, emphasizing the role of scattering matrices.

Contribution

It generalizes the scattering approach to non-equilibrium conditions, allowing precise calculations based solely on surface scattering matrices.

Findings

Exact formulas for Casimir forces out of thermal equilibrium

Surface shape and composition influence through scattering matrices

Applicable to arbitrary nanostructured surfaces

Abstract

We develop an exact method for computing Casimir forces and the power of radiative heat transfer between two arbitrary nanostructured surfaces out of thermal equilibrium. The method is based on a generalization of the scattering approach recently used in investigations on the Casimir effect. Analogously to the equilibrium case, we find that also out of thermal equilibrium the shape and composition of the surfaces enter only through their scattering matrices. The expressions derived provide exact results in terms of the scattering matrices of the intervening surfaces.