Published April 30, 2025 | ASAP Article
Journal Article Open

High-Temperature Strong Nonreciprocal Thermal Radiation from Semiconductors

  • 1. ROR icon University of Houston
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon University of Wisconsin–Madison

Abstract

Nonreciprocal thermal emitters that break the conventional Kirchhoff's law allow independent control of emissivity and absorptivity and promise exciting new functionalities in controlling heat flow for thermal and energy applications. In enabling some of these applications, nonreciprocal thermal emitters will unavoidably need to serve as hot emitters. Leveraging magneto-optical effects, degenerate semiconductors have been demonstrated as a promising optical material platform for nonreciprocal thermal radiation. However, existing modeling and experimental efforts are limited to near room temperature (<373 K), and it remains unclear whether nonreciprocal properties can persist at high temperatures. In this work, we demonstrate strong nonreciprocal radiative properties at temperatures up to 600 K. We propose a theoretical model by considering the temperature dependence of the key parameters for the nonreciprocal behavior and experimentally investigate the temperature dependence of the nonreciprocal properties of sufficiently doped InAs, a degenerate semiconductor, using a customized angle-resolved high-temperature magnetic emissometry setup. Our theoretical model and experimental results show agreement, revealing that strong nonreciprocity can persist at temperatures over 800 K for high-temperature stable semiconductors, enabling a pathway for nonreciprocal radiative heat flow control at high temperatures.

Copyright and License

© 2025, American Chemical Society

Funding

University of Houston SEED program; National Science Foundation Grant No. CBET-2314210.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of the Research Computing Data Core at the University of Houston for assistance with the calculations carried out in this work. B.N. and B.Z. thank Sahag Bozoian, Aniroodh Sivaraman, and Jamar Murray for their assistance in fabricating the magnetic assembly.

Supplemental Material

The Supporting Information is available free of charge at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.5c00365.

  • Theoretical model for GaAs; theoretical model for In0.53Ga0.47As; and angular dependence of the nonreciprocal behavior: ph5c00365_si_001.pdf

 

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Created:
May 6, 2025
Modified:
May 6, 2025