Emissivity measurements with an atomic force microscope

We show that functionalized micromechanical bilayer levers can be used as sensitive probes to accurately measure radiative heat flux in vacuum between two materials at the micro scale. By means of calibration to one material these measurements can be made quantitative for radiative heat flux or for either temperature or material emissivity. We discuss issues and opportunities for our method and provide ample technical details regarding its implementation and demonstrate good correspondence with the Stefan Boltzmann law. We use this system to probe the phase transition of VO2 and find that radiative heat transfer in farfield between VO2 and glass can be reversibly modulated by a factor of 5. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3697673]