Adsorbate vibrational mode enhancement of radiative heat transfer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that adsorbates on solid surfaces can significantly enhance radiative heat transfer at short distances through resonant photon tunneling between vibrational modes, with an experimental verification proposed.

Contribution

It introduces a theory showing adsorbate vibrational modes can greatly increase radiative heat transfer and suggests an experiment to validate this mechanism.

Findings

Heat transfer can increase by orders of magnitude due to adsorbates.

Resonant photon tunneling between vibrational modes is the key mechanism.

An experimental setup is proposed to test the theory.

Abstract

We show that the radiative heat transfer between two solid surfaces at short separation may increase by many order of magnitude when the surfaces are covered by adsorbates. In this case the heat transfer is determined by resonant photon tunneling between adsorbate vibrational modes. We propose an experiment to check the theory.