Xianfan Xu
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Heat moves through solids mainly by conduction. Radiation, heat carried by light, has long been treated as a process that happens across empty space and plays only a minor role inside materials.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
radiative heat transfer
thermal radiation
hyperbolic materials
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Develop theory for how radiative heat transport by hyperbolic phonon polaritons, light-lattice vibration waves, inside hyperbolic materials depends on wavelength and temperature.
- Experimentally measure temperature-dependent, spectral and spatial radiative transport, and the total radiative heat carried, inside hyperbolic materials.
- Investigate greatly enhanced radiative heat transfer across nanometer-size gaps using combined computational and experimental methods.
- Determine how enhanced radiative transport carries heat across interfaces between different materials and devices, to guide thermal co-design.
More about the research
The lab recently found that this is not always true. Inside hyperbolic materials, a class of materials that respond to light very differently along different directions, radiative heat transfer can be greatly enhanced. Managing heat is vital for electronics, photonics, energy conversion and future quantum devices built from such new materials. Understanding this effect could therefore change how engineers design for heat.
Why it matters
Heat removal limits the performance of many electronic, photonic and energy devices. Showing how and how much radiation can carry heat inside hyperbolic materials and across interfaces could guide better thermal design for these technologies. The same physics could also inform high-resolution imaging and sensing, infrared sources for medical use, and energy harvesting devices.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sheila Edalatpour
University of Maine, ME·Engineering·Early-career
Establish a theoretical framework for modeling thermal radiation from quantum materials, whose atomic-scale electronic structure makes them radiate differently from bulk materials.
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.
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.
The school
Purdue University: 43 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 833 research doctorates a year.
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