Significant Enhancement of Near-Field Electromagnetic Heat Transfer in a Multilayer Structure through Multiple Surface-States Coupling.

We show that near-field electromagnetic heat transfer between multilayer thermal bodies can be significantly enhanced by the contributions of surface states at multiple surfaces. As a demonstration, we show that when one of the materials forming the multilayer structure is described by the Drude model, and the other one is a vacuum, at the same gap spacing the resulting heat transfer can be up to 40 times higher as compared to that between two semi-infinite materials described by the same Drude model. Moreover, this system can exhibit a nonmonotonic dependency in its heat transfer coefficient as a function of the middle gap spacing. The enhancement effect in the system persists for realistic materials.