Implementation of Optimal Thermal Radiation Pumps Using Adiabatically Modulated Photonic Cavities

Abstract

We numerically implement the concept of thermal radiation pumps in realistic photonic circuits and demonstrate their efficiency to control the radiation current, emitted between two reservoirs with equal temperature. The proposed pumping scheme involves a cyclic adiabatic modulation of two parameters that control the spectral characteristics of the photonic circuit. We show that the resulting pumping cycle exhibits maximum radiation current when a cyclic modulation of the system is properly engineered to be in the proximity of a resonance degeneracy in the parameter space of the photonic circuit. A developed Floquet scattering framework, which in the adiabatic limit boils down to the analysis of an instantaneous scattering matrix, is offering an engineering tool for designing and predicting the performance of such thermal pumps. Our predictions are confirmed by time-domain simulations invoking an adiabatically driven photonic cavity.