Fluctuational-electrodynamic theory and dynamics of heat transfer in multiple dipolar systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive fluctuational-electrodynamic theory to analyze radiative heat transfer in N-body dipolar systems, revealing how many-body interactions influence temperature distribution and thermal relaxation dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a general theoretical framework for N-body heat transfer in dipolar systems and demonstrates how many-body effects can control thermal relaxation times.

Findings

Many-body interactions significantly alter heat transfer dynamics.

The theory enables tailoring of temperature distributions.

Thermal relaxation times can be drastically changed.

Abstract

A general fluctuational-electrodynamic theory is developed to investigate radiative heat exchanges between objects which are assumed small compared with their thermal wavelength (dipolar approximation) in N-body systems immersed in a thermal bath. This theoretical framework is applied to study the dynamic of heating/cooling of three-body systems. We show that many-body interactions allow to tailor the temperature field distribution and to drastically change the time scale of thermal relaxation processes.