Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer

Shrink the vacuum gap between two nanoscale plates and the rules of thermal radiation change. Far apart, heat exchange between the plates is capped by the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody limit, q = σ(T₁⁴ − T₂⁴). But once the separation drops below the thermal wavelength — tens to hundreds of nanometers — evanescent electromagnetic modes that normally decay uselessly in the near field can instead tunnel across the gap, driving the radiative flux far past that classical limit. This simulator renders the two plates in 3D with a live, log-scale gap control, lets you switch between a polar dielectric (SiO₂, strong surface-phonon-polariton resonance) and a metal (gold, weak coupling), sliders for both plate temperatures, and live numeric readouts of the blackbody flux, the near-field flux, and the enhancement factor between them, alongside an animated visualization of tunneling density.