Near field radiative thermal transfer between nano-structured periodic materials

This paper provides a method based on rigorous coupled wave analysis for the calculation of the radiative thermal capacitance between a layer that is patterned with arbitrary, periodically repeating features and a planar one. This method is applied to study binary gratings and arrays of beams with a rectangular cross section. The effects of the structure size and spacing on the thermal capacitance are investigated. In all of these calculations, a comparison is made with an effective medium theory which becomes increasingly accurate as the structure sizes fall well below the relevant resonance wavelength. Results show that new levels of control over the magnitude and spectral contributions to thermal capacitance can be achieved with corrugated structures relative to planar ones.