SUMMARY

Electromagnetic interactions among arrays of nanostructures exhibit interesting and unusual collective effects. When the nanostructures support surface plasmon polaritons or surface phonon polaritons, coupling between nanostructures can become very strong and enable large energy transfers. These traits have led researchers to investigate polaritonic nanostructure arrays for a variety of energy transport applications. However, practical implementations have been limited due to deficiencies in the theoretical understanding and modeling capabilities of their electromagnetic interactions, particularly between closely spaced nanostructures and nanostructures in complex geometries. This proposal will detail efforts to improve the theoretical description, modeling approach, and experimental investigation of radiative energy transport among polaritonic nanostructures on several fronts. For chains of polaritonic resonators in complex geometries and nonhomogeneous environments, a new modeling approach was developed to characterize sub-diffractional waveguide performance and thermal radiative transport. For multi-dimensional nanostructure arrays, a fluctuational electrodynamics approach is employed to predict thermal transport in chains of nanoparticles in the dipolar limit. Results are compared to a propagating wave approach to understand the contributions of delocalized modes. Additional proposed research includes optimizing thermal transport by plasmonic resonators embedded in nanowires and investigating the contributions of multipolar moments to thermal radiation in multi-dimensional nanoparticle arrays.