2015/09/03 by Baoan Liu, Jiayu Li, Liu, Baoan +3
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Optical properties and cooling technologies in crystalline materials #Optics (physics.optics) #Radiative Heat Transfer Studies #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1509.00939
openalex publication_date 2015/09/03 · arxiv created 2016/11/29 · arxiv updated 2016/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/12/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Although optical resonators are widely used for controlling and engineering thermal radiation, what has been lacking is a general theoretical framework to elucidate the thermal emission of optical resonators, and guide the design and application of thermally driven optical resonators. We developed a general and self-consistent formalism to describe the thermal radiation from arbitrary optical resonators made by lossy and dispersive materials like metals, with the only assumption that the resonators have a single predominant resonance mode. Our formalism demonstrates that the thermal emission of an optical resonator is maximized when the mode losses to the emitter and the absorber (or far-field background) are matched, and meanwhile the predominant resonant modes are electrically quasi-static. By efficiently calculating the resonant modes using the finite element methods, our formalism serves as a general principle of designing the arbitrary optical resonator thermal emitters with perfect or maximized emission.