A mesoscopic description of radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale

Svend-Age Biehs, Emmanuel Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Greffet

Published 2011-03-11Version 1

We present a formulation of the nanoscale radiative heat transfer (RHT) using concepts of mesoscopic physics. We introduce the analog of the Sharvin conductance using the quantum of thermal conductance. The formalism provides a convenient framework to analyse the physics of RHT at the nanoscale. Finally, we propose a RHT experiment in the regime of quantized conductance.