Coherent thermal conductance in multilayer photonic crystals

We present an exact calculation of the coherent thermal conductance in a 1-D multilayer photonic crystals (PC) using the S-matrix method. In particular, we study the thermal conductance in a bilayer structure of slabs of Si/vacuum or Al$_2$O$_3$/vacuum by means of the exact expression for the radiative heat flux. We compare our results with results obtained in previous works. Our results show that the coupling of surface modes as well as material losses play a fundamental role in the definition of the thermal conductance of PCs

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