Three-body amplification of photon heat tunneling

TL;DR

This paper proposes a three-body relay system to amplify photon heat tunneling between bodies, enabling enhanced near-field heat transfer at larger distances for applications in thermal management and energy conversion.

Contribution

Introduction of a passive three-body relay to partially compensate damping in photon heat tunneling, extending near-field transfer effects to larger separations.

Findings

Three-body interactions can significantly amplify heat transfer.

The relay system allows near-field effects at larger distances.

Potential applications in nanoscale thermal management.

Abstract

Resonant tunneling of surface polaritons across a subwavelength vacuum gap between two polar or metallic bodies at different temperatures leads to an almost monochromatic heat transfer which can exceed by several orders of magnitude the far-field upper limit predicted by Planck's blackbody theory. However, despite its strong magnitude, this transfer is very far from the maximum theoretical limit predicted in near-field. Here we propose an amplifier for the photon heat tunneling based on a passive relay system intercalated between the two bodies, which is able to partially compensate the intrinsic exponential damping of energy transmission probability thanks to three-body interaction mechanisms. As an immediate corollary, we show that the exalted transfer observed in near-field between two media can be exported at larger separation distances using such a relay. Photon heat tunneling assisted by three-body interactions enables novel applications for thermal management at nanoscale, near-field energy conversion and infrared spectroscopy.