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Super-Planckian emission cannot really be ‘thermal’

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 397–401 (2022)Cite this article

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A heat-powered emitter can sometimes exceed the Planck thermal-emission limit. We clarify when such super-Planckian emission is possible, arguing that far-field super-Planckian emission requires a distribution of energy that is not consistent with a unique temperature, and therefore the process should not be called ‘thermal emission’.

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Fig. 1: Thought experiment that explains Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation.
Fig. 2: Subwavelength thermal emitters.
Fig. 3: Non-equilibrium heat-powered emission.

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Acknowledgements

M.A.K. and Y.X. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (grant no. 1750341) and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-20-1-2297). M.S. acknowledges support from the NSF (grant no. 2108288) and the Welch Foundation (A-1886). We thank D. Seletskiy, whose live session at the SPIE Digital Forum helped us to crystallize some key questions, and J. Choy, for critical reading of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Yuzhe Xiao & Mikhail A. Kats

  2. Department of Chemistry, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Matthew Sheldon

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  1. Yuzhe Xiao
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Correspondence to Mikhail A. Kats.

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Nature Photonics thanks Takashi Asano, Jacob Khurgin and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1-5, Supplementary Discussion

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Fig. 1b source data.

Source Data Fig. 2

Figs. 2b and 2d source data.

Source Data Fig. 3

Figs. 3d and 3e source data.

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Xiao, Y., Sheldon, M. & Kats, M.A. Super-Planckian emission cannot really be ‘thermal’. Nat. Photon. 16, 397–401 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01005-y

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