Radiative Thermal Transistor

Developing thermal analogues of a field-effect transistor could open the door to a low-power and even zero-power communication technology working with heat rather than electricity. These solid-sate devices could also find many applications in the field of active thermal management in numerous technologies (microelectronic, building science, energy harvesting and conversion...). Recent theoretical works have suggested that a photonic transistor made with three terminals can, in principle, be used to switch, modulate, and even amplify heat flux through exchange of thermal photons. Here, we report an experimental demonstration of thermal transistor effect using a noncontact system composed of a temperature-controlled metal-insulator-based material interacting in the far-field regime with two blackbodies held at two different temperatures. We demonstrate that, with a tiny change in the temperature of the active layer, the heat flux received by the cold blackbody can be drastically modified. An amplification parameter of heat flux over 20 is reported.