A mesoscopic description of radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale

TL;DR

This paper develops a mesoscopic physics framework for understanding radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale, introducing concepts like quantum of thermal conductance and proposing an experiment to observe quantized conductance effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mesoscopic formalism for nanoscale radiative heat transfer, including an analog of Sharvin conductance and a proposed experiment for quantized conductance regimes.

Findings

Framework for nanoscale RHT using mesoscopic physics

Introduction of quantum of thermal conductance in RHT

Proposal for an experiment to observe quantized conductance

Abstract

We present a formulation of the nanoscale radiative heat transfer (RHT) using concepts of mesoscopic physics. We introduce the analog of the Sharvin conductance using the quantum of thermal conductance. The formalism provides a convenient framework to analyse the physics of RHT at the nanoscale. Finally, we propose a RHT experiment in the regime of quantized conductance.