Thermal routing via near-field radiative heat transfer

The diffusive nature of heat flow lays a formidable obstacle for directional heat manipulation, not akin to the wave-governed electromagnetics that can be well controlled in intensity and direction. By modulating the near-field radiative heat transfer among graphene/SiC core-shell (GSCS) nanoparticles, we propose the concept of thermal routing to address the directional heat manipulation in a particular many-body setup. The graphene shell introduces a minor polarizability peak and remarkably modifies the localized surface resonance of the particle, which plays a significant role in the radiative heat transfer within the many-body system consisting of GSCS nanoparticles. Consequently, Fermi levels of graphene shells matching allows directional radiative heat flow, thus enabling thermal routing manifested by variant designated temperature distributions. The proposed thermal routing could be used to dynamically tune heat flow in integrated nano-objects for thermal manipulation, and also opens avenues for exploiting novel thermal functionalities via radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.