Enhancement and suppression of near-field radiative heat transfer in planar many-body systems

This work presents an alternative scheme for modulating near-field radiative heat transfer (NFRHT) within an extended planar many-body system, marking a significant stride in thermal management for micro- and nanodevices. Our approach leverages an adjustable number of interacting bodies, offering a dynamic solution to enhance or suppress NFRHT across diverse configurations. Utilizing the general Green's function approach alongside the scattering matrix method, we establish a Landauer-like formalism, providing a clear, comprehensive framework for calculating NFRHT in many-body systems. This framework adeptly accommodates variations in physical parameters such as layer thickness, separation distance, and material properties, thus facilitating a broad spectrum of many-body planar configurations. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of introducing intermediate layers between traditional two-body systems, enabling additional heat transfer channels and significantly influencing the overall radiative heat flux. By adjusting the relative positions of these layers, the system transitions seamlessly between two-body, three-body, and four-body configurations, offering versatile heat flux modulation. The introduction of artificially engineered materials as intermediate layers further amplifies this effect, showcasing a consistent heat flux enhancement across extended gap distances ($d$) and thicknesses ($t$) up to 225 nm, with the maximum amplification of $60%$ occurring in regions where $t\ensuremath{\approx}d$. This investigation provides insights into the interactions within complex many-body systems and introduces a practical methodology for precise thermal flux control, paving the way for advancements in nanoscale energy harvesting, photonics, and sensing devices.