Coherent thermal conductance in multilayer photonic crystals

Abstract : We present an exact calculation of the coherent thermal conductance in a 1-D multilayer photonic crystals (PC) using the S-matrix method. In particular, we study the thermal conductance in a bilayer structure of slabs of Si/vacuum or Al2O3/vacuum by means of the exact expression for the radiative heat flux. We compare our results with results obtained in previous works. Our results show that the coupling of surface modes as well as material losses play a fundamental role in the definition of the thermal conductance of PCs.