nd - m at . m tr l - sc i ] 2 3 M ay 2 00 6 Adsorbate vibrational mode enhancement of radiative heat transfer

We show that the radiative heat transfer between two solid surfaces at short separation may increase by many order of magnitude when the surfaces are covered by adsorbates. In this case the heat transfer is determined by resonant photon tunneling between adsorbate vibra-tional modes. We propose an experiment to check the theory. It is well known that for bodies separated by d >> d T = c¯ h/k B T , the radiative heat transfer between them is described by the Stefan-Bolzman law: S = π 2 k 4 B 60¯ h 3 c 2 T 4 1 − T 4 2 , (1) where T 1 and T 2 are the temperatures of solid 1 and 2, respectively. In this limiting case the heat transfer is connected with traveling electromagnetic waves radiated by the bodies, and does not depend on the separation d. For d < d T the heat transfer increases by many order of magnitude due to the evanescent electromagnetic waves that decay exponentially into the vacuum; this is often refereed to as photon tunneling. At present there is an increasing number of investigations of heat transfer due to evanescent waves 1