Radiative thermal switch via asymmetric black phosphorus gratings

TL;DR

This paper proposes a radiative thermal switch using asymmetric black phosphorus gratings, achieving high modulation of heat transfer through mechanical rotation, with potential applications in thermal management and circuits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel RTS design with asymmetric BP gratings that offers superior switching performance and temperature flexibility compared to existing phase change material-based switches.

Findings

Switching factors up to 90% at 50 nm vacuum gap

Over 70% switching efficiency in far-field regime

High tunability via mechanical rotation of gratings

Abstract

Active control of heat transfer at the nanoscale has great potentials in thermal logic and energy conversion devices. In the present work, we theoretically propose a radiative thermal switch (RTS) composed of a pair of asymmetric black phosphorus (BP) gratings, with BP nanoribbons periodically patterned in different directions. The simply mechanical rotation between the gratings enables substantial modulation of near-field radiative heat transfer, especially when combined with the use of non-identical parameters, i.e., filling factors and electron densities of BP. Among all the cases including asymmetric BP gratings, symmetric BP gratings, and BP films, we find that the asymmetric BP gratings possess the most excellent switching performance. The optimized switching factors can be as high as 90% with the vacuum separation d=50 nm and higher than 70% even in the far-field regime. The high-performance switching is basically attributed to the rotatable-tunable matching degree between the surface characteristics of the two asymmetric gratings. Moreover, due to the twisting principle, the RTS can work at any temperature, which has great advantage over the phase change materials-based RTS. The proposed switching scheme has great significance for the applications in thermal management and thermal circuits.