Contactless heat flux control with photonic devices

The ability to control electric currents in solids using diodes and transistors is undoubtedly at the origin of the main developments in modern electronics which have revolutionized the daily life in the second half of 20th century. Surprisingly, until the year 2000 no thermal counterpart for such a control had been proposed. Since then, based on pioneering works on the control of phononic heat currents new devices were proposed which allow for the control of heat fluxes carried by photons rather than phonons or electrons. The goal of the present paper is to summarize the main advances achieved recently in the field of thermal energy control with photons.Comment: Invited Revie

On Super-Planckian thermal emission in far field regime

We study, in the framework of the Landauer theory, the thermal emission in far-field regime, of arbitrary indefinite planar media and finite size systems. We prove that the flux radiated by the former is bounded by the blackbody emission while, for the second, there is in principle, no upper limit demonstrating so the possibility for a super-Planckian thermal emission with finite size systems

Thermotronics: toward nanocircuits to manage radiative heat flux

The control of electric currents in solids is at the origin of the modern electronics revolution which has driven our daily life since the second half of 20th century. Surprisingly, to date, there is no thermal analog for a control of heat flux. Here, we summarize the very last developments carried out in this direction to control heat exchanges by radiation both in near and far-field in complex architecture networks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1503.0498