Efficient computation of thermal radiation from biperiodic layered systems using the T-matrix method

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient T-matrix based computational method for analyzing thermal radiation from biperiodic layered metasurfaces, enabling accurate and rapid simulations across multiple parameters and directions.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel T-matrix based approach combined with the Kirchhoff law for fast, accurate thermal radiation calculations in complex layered metasurfaces.

Findings

Method accurately reproduces experimental data

Predicts highly circularly polarized emissivity

Outperforms existing methods in computational efficiency

Abstract

Metasurfaces are becoming important tools for the control of thermal radiation. Understanding their functional possibilities on computational grounds requires evaluating the response of the biperiodic layered system for many degrees of freedom, including several radiation directions and polarisations, while varying lattice spacing, thicknesses, and/or materials of homogeneous layers, over a range of frequencies. The diverse set of cases that need to be considered in simulations prompts for efficient numerical tools to handle them. To respond to this need, we present a method for computing the thermal radiation from metasurfaces that combines the directional Kirchhoff law with efficient T-matrix based calculations. We show that such a method can accurately reproduce experimental data from a metasurface made of platinum square plates. Additionally, we predict highly circularly polarised emissivity from a chiral metasurface. When comparing CPU-times, the method outperforms other approaches such as rigorous coupled wave analysis already at the modest number of 61 cases per frequency.