Super-Planckian near-field thermal emission with phonon-polaritonic hyperbolic metamaterials

We study super-Planckian near-field heat exchanges for multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials using exact scattering-matrix (S-matrix) calculations. We investigate heat exchanges between two multilayer hyperbolic metamaterial structures. We show that the super-Planckian emission of such metamaterials can either come from the presence of surface phonon-polariton modes or from a continuum of hyperbolic modes depending on the choice of composite materials as well as the structural configuration. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4800233]