Sheila Edalatpour
University of Maine, ME·Engineering·Early-career
All objects give off heat as thermal radiation. Materials that are only a few nanometers or atoms thick radiate heat very differently from ordinary bulk materials, because their electronic structure changes at that scale.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
thermal radiation
radiative heat transfer
quantum materials
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Establish a theoretical framework for modeling thermal radiation from quantum materials, whose atomic-scale electronic structure makes them radiate differently from bulk materials.
- Theoretically study how quantum materials of different dimensions emit thermal radiation.
- Experimentally demonstrate how quantum size effects change both the magnitude and the spectrum of thermal emission.
- Determine how electron tunneling modifies radiative heat transfer between metals separated by quantum-scale gaps, beyond fluctuational-electrodynamics predictions.
More about the research
Heat can also pass between surfaces separated by gaps only atoms wide, where quantum effects such as electrons tunneling across the gap appear. These effects matter for recovering waste heat, radiative cooling, smart windows and keeping transistors and compact electronics cool. Yet how heat is emitted and exchanged at the quantum level is not well understood.
Why it matters
Controlling how quantum-scale materials radiate heat could enable more efficient waste-heat recovery with nano-gap thermophotovoltaics, which turn heat into electricity, along with radiative cooling and smart windows. It could also improve thermal management in transistors, ultra-compact circuits, quantum computers, solar cells and medical imagers, helping to conserve energy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
Jivtesh Garg
University of Oklahoma, OK·Engineering
Test whether evanescent electric fields across 2–4 Å interfacial gaps help acoustic phonons, the lattice vibrations that carry heat, cross GaN–diamond interfaces, using atomistic Green's function calculations.
Yan Wang
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how wave-like phonons, atomic vibrations that carry heat, travel, scatter and become trapped in periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic structures, combining spectral phonon analysis with phonon spectroscopy.
The school
University of Maine: 10 labs on PI Pages, $199M a year on research, 81 research doctorates a year.
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