My twelfth paper has been published! It is in volume 93, issue 2 of Reviews of Modern Physics, and an older preprint of it is available too for those who don't have access to academic journals (it is identical in content and only differs in formatting). Unlike my previous blog posts about published papers that I have written, this one will not strictly use the thousand most common words in English. This is because unlike my previous papers, which put forth novel ideas advancing the field of nanophotonics, this is a review paper that gives a broad historical scientific overview of the subject, namely, the flow of heat through light (i.e. electromagnetic (EM) fields) between objects that are typically separated by less than 1 micron (approximately 1% of the width of a typical human hair). It goes over work that other scientists have done theoretically and experimentally in this subject, and this paper in particular is divided into two main sections.
The first section, to which my PhD advisor & I made most of our contributions, is about the flow of heat via EM fields between just 2 objects. Relevant issues include choices of materials (mainly metals/conductors versus insulators), choices of shapes for objects, advances in experimental measurement techniques, advances in computational simulation techniques, and derivations of upper limits to the flow of heat via EM fields between 2 objects (mostly referring to my previous 2 papers that were the subject of the following linked blog post).
The second section, which constitutes the bulk of the paper, is about the flow of heat via EM fields among more than 2 objects. Relevant issues include changes in temperature over time in objects that are very small compared to their separations, the fact that the heat flow among more than 2 objects involves very complicated interactions among them, the fact that material properties could depend on temperature so there could be many possible sets of object temperatures where heat flows but temperatures don't change, heat flow via EM fields over distances longer than 1 micron, applications of heat flow via EM fields to microscopy techniques, heat flow via EM fields in materials that can be attracted to permanent magnets, and applications of heat flow via EM fields to engineer new devices.