Plasmonic Thermal Emitter with Hyperbolic Metamaterial Heat Source

The development of high-efficiency thermal emitters with high spectral purity will provide a significant advantage for hardware-in-the-loop infrared scene testing. Nanohmics Inc. in collaboration with The University of Texas at Austin, propose to demonstrate a novel hyperbolic metamaterial (h-MM) driven plasmonic thermal emitter (i.e. optical antenna) that provides spectrally-tuned mid-wave and long-wave infrared emission for scene projection. The thermal emission wavelength and bandwidth will be controlled by engineering the antenna spectral resonance. The antennas will be thermally pumped by an h-MM heater with orders of magnitude enhanced near-field heat transfer properties compared to blackbodies at the same temperature. Using a suspended pixel architecture to reduce thermal mass and a first-of-its-kind h-MM heating scheme, the system will be more energy efficient than thermal pixel arrays, will be capable of achieving apparent temperatures higher than 1000 C, and will operate at frame rates greater than 1 kHz with very little pixel thermal cross-talk.