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Realization of dynamic thermal emission control

Nature Materials volume 13, pages 928–931 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Thermal emission in the infrared range is important in various fields of research, including chemistry, medicine and atmospheric science1,2,3. Recently, the possibility of controlling thermal emission based on wavelength-scale optical structures has been intensively investigated with a view towards a new generation of thermal emission devices4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. However, all demonstrations so far have involved the ‘static’ control of thermal emission; high-speed modulation of thermal emission has proved difficult to achieve because the intensity of thermal emission from an object is usually determined by its temperature, and the frequency of temperature modulation is limited to 10–100 Hz even when the thermal mass of the object is small12. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the dynamic control of thermal emission via the control of emissivity (absorptivity), at a speed four orders of magnitude faster than is possible using the conventional temperature-modulation method. Our approach is based on the dynamic control of intersubband absorption in n-type quantum wells, which is enhanced by an optical resonant mode in a photonic crystal slab. The extraction of electrical carriers from the quantum wells leads to an immediate change in emissivity from 0.74 to 0.24 at the resonant wavelength while maintaining much lower emissivity at all other wavelengths.

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Figure 1: Structure and calculated characteristics of a dynamically controllable thermal emitter.
Figure 2: Fabricated dynamically controllable thermal emitter.
Figure 3: Thermal emission spectra of fabricated emitter.
Figure 4: Dynamic performance of fabricated thermal emitter.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) from the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), and by Grants for Excellent Graduate Schools from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). T.I. also acknowledges support from a Research Fellowship of the JSPS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Science and Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto 615-8510, Japan

    Takuya Inoue, Menaka De Zoysa, Takashi Asano & Susumu Noda

Authors
  1. Takuya Inoue
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  2. Menaka De Zoysa
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  3. Takashi Asano
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  4. Susumu Noda
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Contributions

S.N. supervised the entire project with T.A. T.I. fabricated the samples, performed the experiments and analysed the data with M.D.Z. S.N., T.I., M.D.Z. and T.A. discussed the results and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Susumu Noda.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Inoue, T., Zoysa, M., Asano, T. et al. Realization of dynamic thermal emission control. Nature Mater 13, 928–931 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4043

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