Metasurfaces Assisted Twisted α-MoO3 for Spinning Thermal Radiation

Micromachines (Basel). 2022 Oct 17;13(10):1757. doi: 10.3390/mi13101757.

Abstract

Spinning thermal radiation has demonstrated applications in engineering, such as radiation detection and biosensing. In this paper, we propose a new spin thermal radiation emitter composed of the twisted bilayer α-MoO3 metasurface; in our study, it provided more degrees of freedom to control circular dichroism by artificially modifying the filling factor of the metasurface. In addition, circular dichroism was significantly enhanced by introducing a new degree of freedom (filling factor), with a value that could reach 0.9. Strong-spin thermal radiation resulted from the polarization conversion of circularly polarized waves using the α-MoO3 metasurface and selective transmission of linearly polarized waves by the substrate. This allowed for extra flexible control of spinning thermal radiation and significantly enhanced circular dichroism, which promises applications in biosensing and radiation detection. As a result of their unique properties, hyperbolic materials have applications not only in spin thermal radiation, but also in areas such as near-field thermal radiation. In this study, hyperbolic materials were combined with metasurfaces to offer a new idea regarding modulating near-field radiative heat transfer.

Keywords: metasurface; spin thermal radiation; twisted α-MoO3.