Radiative Thermal Transistor

TL;DR

This paper presents an experimental demonstration of a thermal transistor that modulates heat flux using a non-contact, far-field system, achieving significant amplification with minimal temperature change, opening new avenues for heat-based communication and thermal management.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental realization of a thermal transistor using a non-contact far-field system with a metal-insulator material and blackbodies, demonstrating heat flux modulation and amplification.

Findings

Heat flux can be drastically modulated with tiny temperature changes.

An amplification parameter over 20 was achieved.

The system operates in the far-field regime without contact.

Abstract

Developing thermal analogues of field-effect transistor could open the door to a low-power and even zero-power communication technology working with heat rather than electricity. These solid-sate devices could also find many applications in the field of active thermal management in numerous technologies (microelectronic, building science, energy harvesting,conversion,...). Recent theoretical works has suggested that a photonic transistor made with three terminals can in principle be used to switch, modulate, and even amplify heat flux through exchange of thermal photons. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of thermal transistor effect using a non-contact system composed by a temperature-controlled metal-insulator-based material interacting in far-field regime with two blackbodies held at two different temperatures. We demonstrate that, with a tiny change in the temperature of the active layer, the heat flux received by the cold blackbody can be drastically modified. An amplification parameter of heat flux over 20 is reported.