Experimental Determination of Absolute Spectral Radiance and Emissivity of a Photonic Crystal Filament

Abstract

A recent discovery of super-Planckian radiation in the far-field has attracted a great deal of interest in thermal radiation control using photonic crystals (PC) architecture. The finding is based on a careful comparison of radiation intensity emitted from a PC nano-filament and a blackbody at the same temperature and same wavelength at λ∼1.7 μm. Extending that finding, we determined the absolute spectral radiance of such a PC filament at λ∼1.7 μm at elevated temperature, T = 445–723 °K, and compared its value to that predicted by Planck's blackbody radiation law. Our data confirmed that the PC spectral radiance surpassed that of a blackbody by an order-of-magnitude. We also determined the spectral emissivity of our PC filament and showed that its value far exceeded unity at resonance and fell below unity away from resonance. The observation of non-equality between absorptivity and emissivity suggests that a strong optical non-reciprocity takes place in our PC nano-filament.

Keywords

• Nano-photonics
• novel photon sources
• photonic crystals
• photonic materials and engineered photonic structures