Near-complete violation of Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation with a 0.3 T magnetic field

The capability to overcome Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation provides new opportunities in energy harvesting and thermal radiation control. Previously, design towards demonstrating such capability requires a magnetic field of 3 T, which is difficult to achieve in practice. In this work, we propose a nanophotonic design that can achieve such capability with a far more modest magnetic field of 0.3 Tesla, a level that can be achieved with permanent magnets. Our design uses guided resonance in low-loss dielectric gratings sitting on a magneto-optical material, which provides significant enhancement on the sensitivity to the external magnetic field. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America