Near-field refrigeration and tunable heat exchange through four-wave mixing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel four-wave mixing scheme enabling efficient near-field thermal refrigeration and tunable heat exchange across various gap sizes and temperatures, with potential applications in thermal management.

Contribution

The authors extend a four-wave mixing scheme to achieve low-intensity near-field refrigeration and tunable heat transfer, advancing control over thermal energy exchange.

Findings

Efficient thermal refrigeration at low intensities (~10^{-9} W/m^2)

Wide range of operational gap sizes and temperatures

Tunable magnitude and direction of near-field heat exchange

Abstract

We modify and extend a recently proposed four-wave mixing scheme [Opt. Express 25 (19),23164 (2017)] for achieving near-field thermal upconversion and energy transfer, to demonstrate efficient thermal refrigeration at low intensities $\sim 10^{-9}$W/m$^2$ over a wide range of gap sizes (from tens to hundreds of nanometers) and operational temperatures (from tens to hundreds of Kelvins). We further exploit the scheme to achieve magnitude and directional tunability of near-field heat exchange between bodies held at different temperatures.