Active control of thermal emission by graphene-nanowire coupled plasmonic metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates active control of thermal emission using a graphene-nanowire coupled plasmonic metasurface, enabling significant spectral emissivity tuning and enhanced angular modulation for thermal engineering applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid plasmonic metasurface combining nanowires and graphene, allowing active spectral and angular emissivity control with high efficiency.

Findings

Graphene gating can tune emissivity by nearly 90%.

Hybrid plasmon modes enhance p-polarized emissivity modulation.

The metasurface achieves five-fold emissivity enhancement at large angles.

Abstract

Metasurfaces, together with graphene plasmonics, have become prominent for the emissivity control in thermal engineering, both passively through changing the geometric parameters and packing density of the metasurfaces, and actively through graphene gating or doping. We demonstrate a graphene-nanowire coupled plasmonic metasurface utilizing the hybrid localized surface plasmon modes of the nanowire array and graphene. The nanowire array makes the hybrid surface plasmon mode localized, allowing a free-space excitation. The single layer graphene, via the gating between the underneath mirror and a top electrode, can actively tune the spectral emissivity by almost 90%. In addition, the hybrid plasmon mode provides an extra degree of freedom to modulate the p-polarized emissivity with a five-fold enhancement, especially for large emission angles.