Radiative Heat Transfer and 2D Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Materials

TL;DR

This paper investigates radiative heat transfer in 2D transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers, combining first-principles calculations and analytical models to understand scaling laws and material-specific signatures for energy applications.

Contribution

It introduces a combined ab initio and analytical modeling approach to study radiative heat transfer in 2D TMDC monolayers, enabling the development of a materials database.

Findings

Scaling laws for radiative heat transfer in TMDCs

Material-specific signatures influencing heat transfer

Potential for enhanced energy harvesting applications

Abstract

Radiative heat transfer is of great interest from a fundamental point of view and for energy harvesting applications. This is a material dependent phenomenon where confined plasmonic excitations, hyperbolicity and other properties can be effective channels for enhancement, especially at the near field regime. Materials with reduced dimensions may offer further benefits of enhancement compared to the bulk systems. Here we study the radiative thermal power in the family of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers in their H- and T-symmetries. For this purpose, the computed from first principles electronic and optical properties are then used in effective models to understand the emerging scaling laws for metals and semiconductors as well as specific materials signatures as control knobs for radiative heat transfer. Our combined approach of analytical modeling with properties from ab initio simulations can be used for other materials families to build a materials database for radiative heat transfer.