The emission of thermal radiation is a physical process of both fundamental and technological interest. From different perspectives, the emission of thermal radiation can be regarded either as one of the basic mechanisms of heat transfer, as a fundamental quantum phenomenon of photon production, or as the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Focusing on these approaches, here we survey some of the most significant scientific and technological breakthroughs in thermal emission engineering, from fundamental aspects to new phenomena and innovative applications, highlighting the enticing opportunities brought about by transiting from approaches based on spatial modeling to the recent proposal of temporally modulated media.
Electromagnetic momentum inside a material is notion quite subtle to define, related to the Abraham-Minkowski debate. With new class of metamaterials emerging, allowing for extreme electromagnetic parameters such as near-zero refractive index materials or time-varying materials, those subtilties should treated with great care. Here, we revise fundamental radiative processes, momentum transfer experiments, diffraction, Doppler shift, Heisenberg inequality and microscopy applications inside near-zero refractive index. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Minkowski momentum -related to spatial translation - is a conserved quantity inside time-varying media by three independent approaches. However, we stress how the Abraham momentum – related to energy transport – is not a conserved quantity in time-varying media.
Near-zero-index (NZI) media offers fascinating properties in engineering light-matter interactions. However, the realization of integrated photonics NZI technologies relies on photonic crystals suffering from spatial dispersion and radiative losses. Our work discusses the radiative properties of Dirac-cone metamaterials, considering both the design challenges and the opportunities arising from it. In general, we discuss how designing radiative losses empowers novel forms of dissipation engineering. It allows for a pure silicon photonics implementation of generalized coherent perfect absorption (CPA) effects in classical and quantum photonic networks.
Absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission are the paramount light-matter interactions encountered in photonics. Here, we theoretically investigate those three pre-cited phenomena inside unbounded media with a vanishingly small refractive index (NZI materials). Our formalism describes the effect of the spatial dimensionality of the NZI medium as well as the class of NZI materials (epsilon-near zero, mu-near zero or epsilon and mu-near zero). For example, spontaneous emission might be inhibited in 3D homogeneous lossless NZI media but be greatly enhanced in an NZI material of reduced dimensionality.
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