Multichannel nonreciprocal thermal radiation with Weyl semimetal and photonic crystal heterostructure

Abstract

A novel scheme for achieving multichannel nonreciprocal thermal radiation, which is in the form of a photonic crystal heterostructure sandwiched between two symmetric dielectric spacers and Weyl semimetal film backed with a metal film, is proposed and studied. A dual-channel nonreciprocal thermal emitter is first designed and studied as an illustration. It is found that near-perfect nonreciprocal radiations are realized at two different wavelengths at the same time. The underlying physical origin of this phenomenon is disclosed by investigating the magnetic field distribution. In addition, the novel dual-channel nonreciprocal radiation performance is robust to variations in geometric parameters, which will benefit real fabrication and application. What's more, the scheme can be easily expanded to achieve multi-band nonreciprocal radiation with the channel number larger than two by simply increasing the sequence order of the photonic crystal heterostructure. The scheme proposed in this paper provides a new possibility to develop novel multichannel nonreciprocal thermal emitters.

Keywords

• Nonreciprocal radiation
• Weyl semimetal
• Multichannel emitter
• Kirchhoff's law