Spectrally-tailored thermal emitters in the mid-infrared are needed for applications including gas sensing. We experimentally demonstrate a spectrally-selective, electrically-driven thermal emitter based on an aligned carbon nanotube metamaterial. Hyperbolic nanoribbon resonators patterned in the nanotube metamaterial double as resistive heaters and provide resonant polarized thermal emission in the infrared. The width of the nanoribbon resonators and their angle relative to the nanotube alignment axis can be designed to tailor the resonant frequency of the thermal radiation. Because of the low thermal mass of this design, the emitted thermal radiation can be modulated at rates up to 1 MHz.
We show that self-assembled films of horizontally aligned carbon nanotubes are a electrostatically tunable hyperbolic metamaterial using spectroscopic ellipsometry. We map the hyperbolic dispersion of plasmonic modes in aligned carbon nanotube films using transmission measurements of nanoribbon resonators and find good agreement with a theoretical model based on the optical properties dervied from the ellipsometry. Self-assembled films of carbon nanotubes are well-suited for applications in thermal emission and photodetection, and they serve as model systems for studying light–matter interactions in the deep subwavelength regime.
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