Control of thermal transport is of significant interest for a wide range of applications, such as buildings, vehicles and batteries, thermo-electric and solar-thermal energy conversion, bio/chemical sensing, etc. However, heat transfer processes are often difficult to actively control: heat conduction is usually diffusive in nature owing to the incoherence of heat carriers and thermal radiation is generally broadband or have wide energy distribution. In this talk, I will introduce a thermo-photonic engineering approach to manipulate nanoscale heat transport by using surface phonon polaritons (SPhP). I will mainly focus on how the SPhP can be utilized to tailor thermal radiation properties, especially to achieve a coherent, near-monochromatic far-field thermal emission, which is a big departure from the incandescent behaviour in the classic textbook as described by the Planck’s law.
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