Extraordinary Coherent Thermal Emission From SiC Due to Coupled Resonant Cavities

In high temperature and vacuum applications, when heat transfer is predominantly by radiation, the material’s surface texture is of substantial importance. Several micro- and nanostructure designs have been proposed to enhance a material’s emissivity and its radiative coherence, as control of thermal emission is of crucial concern in the design of infrared sources, optical filters, and sensing devices. In this research, an extraordinary coherent thermal emission from an anisotropic microstructure is experimentally and theoretically presented. The enhanced coherency is due to coherent coupling between resonant cavities obtained by surface standing waves, wherein each cavity supports a localized field that is attributed to coupled surface phonon polaritons. We show that it is possible to obtain a polarized quasimonochromatic thermal source from a SiC microstructure with a high quality factor of 600 at the resonant frequency of the cavity and a spatial coherence length of 716 wavelengths, which corresponds to an angular divergence of $1.4mrad$⁠. In the experimental results, we measured a quality factor of 200 and a spatial coherence length of 143 wavelengths. We attribute the deviation in the experimental results to imperfections in the fabrication of the high quality factor cavities.