Eur. Phys. J. B (2018) 91: 59
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2018-80596-8

Regular Article

Nonlinear thermotics: nonlinearity enhancement and harmonic generation in thermal metasurfaces

¹ Department of Physics, State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics, and Key Laboratory of Micro and Nano Photonic Structures (MOE), Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, P.R. China
² Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing 210093, P.R. China

^a e-mail: jphuang@fudan.edu.cn

Received: 20 October 2017
Received in final form: 5 December 2017
Published online: 29 March 2017

Abstract

We propose and investigate a class of structural surfaces (metasurfaces). We develop the perturbation theory and the effective medium theory to study the thermal properties of the metasurface. We report that the coefficient of temperature-dependent (nonlinear) item in thermal conductivity can be enhanced under certain conditions. Furthermore, the existence of nonlinear item helps to generate high-order harmonic frequencies of heat flux in the presence of a heat source with periodic temperature. This work paves a different way to control and manipulate the transfer of heat, and it also makes it possible to develop nonlinear thermotics in the light of nonlinear optics.