Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer Between Mie Resonance-Based Metamaterials Made of Coated Nonmagnetic Particles

Near-field radiative heat transfer between Mie resonance-based metamaterials composed of SiC/d-Si (silicon carbide and doped silicon) core/shell particles immersed in aligned nematic liquid crystals are numerically investigated. The metamaterials composed of core/shell particles exhibit superior performances of enhanced heat transfer and obvious modulation effect when compared to that without shell. The underlying mechanism can be explained that the excitation of Fröhlich mode and epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) resonances both contribute to the total heat flux. Modulation of near-field radiative heat transfer can be realized with the host material of aligned nematic liquid crystals. The largest modulation ratio could be achieved as high as 0.45 for metamaterials composed of core/shell SiC/d-Si particles, and the corresponding heat flux is higher than other similar materials such as LiTaO₃/GaSb and Ge/LiTaO₃. While with the same volume filling fraction, the modulation ratio of that composed of SiC particles is only 0.2. We show that the core/shell nanoparticles dispersed liquid crystals (NDLCs) have a great potential in enhancing the near-field radiative heat transfer in both the p and s polarizations with the radii of 0.65 μm, and Mie-metamaterials are shown for the first time to modulate heat flux within sub-milliseconds.