Thermal excitation of plasmons for near-field thermophotovoltaics

Abstract: The traditional approaches of exciting plasmons consist of using electrons (eg: electron energy loss spectroscopy) or light (Kretchman and Otto geometry) while more recently plasmons have been excited even by single photons. A different approach: thermal excitation of a plasmon resonance at high temperatures using alternate plasmonic media was proposed by S. Molesky et.al., Opt. Exp. 21.101, A96-A110, (2013). Here, we show how the long-standing search for a high temperature narrow band near-field emitter for thermophotovoltaics can be fulfilled by high temperature plasmonics. We also describe how to control Wein's displacement law in the near-field using high temperature epsilon-near-zero metamaterials. Finally, we show that our work opens up an interesting direction of research for the field of slow light: thermal emission control.