2008/01/25 by Pierre-Olivier Chapuis, Pierre‐Olivier Chapuis, Sébastian Volz +5
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #cond-mat.other #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.77.035431
published as Physical Review B 77, 3 (2008) 035431 · Version without figures (8 figures in the complete version)
openalex publication_date 2008/01/25 · arxiv created 2008/02/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the heat transfer between two parallel metallic semi-infinite media with a gap in the nanometer-scale range. We show that the near-field radiative heat flux saturates at distances smaller than the metal skin depth when using a local dielectric constant and investigate the origin of this effect. The effect of nonlocal corrections is analyzed using the Lindhard-Mermin and Boltzmann-Mermin models. We find that local and nonlocal models yield the same heat fluxes for gaps larger than 2\phantom\rule0.3em0exnm. Finally, we explain the saturation observed in a recent experiment as a manifestation of the skin depth and show that heat is mainly dissipated by eddy currents in metallic bodies.