Thermal extraction: enhancing thermal emission of finite size macroscopic blackbody to far-field vacuum

Abstract

The understanding of far-field thermal radiation had directly led to the discovery of quantum mechanics a century ago, and is of great current practical importance for applications in energy conversions, radiative cooling, and thermal control. It is commonly assumed that for any macroscopic thermal emitter, its maximal emitted power within any given frequency range cannot exceed that of a blackbody with the same surface area. In contrast to such conventional wisdom, here we propose, and experimentally demonstrate, that the emitted power from a finite size macroscopic blackbody to far field vacuum can be significantly enhanced, within the constraint of the second law of thermodynamics. To achieve such an enhancement, the thermal body needs to have internal electromagnetic density of states (DOS) greater than that of vacuum, and one needs to provide a thermal extraction mechanism to enable the contributions of all internal modes to far field radiation.