Scale Law of Far-Field Thermal Radiation from Plasmonic Metasurfaces

Although metamaterials or metasurfaces consisting of patterned subwavelength structures have been widely employed for thermal emission control, the collective behavior of the emitter array in a metasurface still remains unclear. Here, based on the quasinormal mode theory, we derive a new scale law to elucidate the far-field thermal emission from a metasurface composed of densely packed plasmonic nanoemitters. The tight binding method is used to approximate the collective resonant mode of the emitter array. Because of in-phase near-field interaction, the thermal radiation from a single emitter in a metasurface is suppressed by its adjacent emitters. We find that the overall far-field thermal radiation from a metasurface can be either positively or negatively correlated with the packing density of the emitters, depending on the mode properties of the single emitter. This new scale law thus serves as a general guideline for designing metasurfaces with desired thermal emission properties.