Radiative bistability and thermal memory

Abstract

We predict the existence of a thermal bistability in many-body systems out of thermal equilibrium which exchange heat by thermal radiation using insulator-metal transition (IMT) materials. We propose a writing-reading procedure and demonstrate the possibility to exploit the thermal bistability to make a volatile thermal memory. We show that this thermal memory can be used to store heat and thermal information (via an encoding temperature) for arbitrary long times. The radiative thermal bistability could find broad applications in the domains of thermal management, information processing and energy storage.