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In this article, we study the thermal light emission from individual fibers of an industrial glass material, which are elementary building blocks of glass wool boards used for thermal insulation. Thermal emission spectra of single fibers of various diameters partially suspended on air are measured in the far-field by means of infrared spatial modulation spectroscopy.These experimental spectra are compared with the theoretical absorption efficiency spectra of cylindrical shaped fibers calculated analytically in the framework of Mie theory taking as an input the measured permittivity of the industrial glass material. An excellent qualitative agreement is found between the measured thermal radiation spectra and the theoretical absorption efficiency spectra., Comment: 25 pages, 5 figures, JQSRT, 2019

We study a quantum system composed of three interacting qubits, each coupled to a different thermal reservoir. We show how to engineer it in order to build a quantum device that is analogous to an electronic bipolar transistor. We outline how the interaction among the qubits plays a crucial role for the appearance of the effect, also linking it to the characteristics of system-bath interactions that govern the decoherence and dissipation mechanism of the system. By comparing with previous proposals, the model considered here extends the regime of parameters where the transistor effect shows up and its robustness with respect to small variations of the coupling parameters. Moreover, our model appears to be more realistic and directly connected in terms of potential implementations to feasible setups in the domain of quantum spin chains and molecular nanomagnets., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. Comments are welcome

We analyze in this work some analogies between thermal emission of nano objects and Hawking's radiation. We first focus on the famous expression of the black hole radiating temperature derived by Hawking in 1974 and consider the case of thermal emission of a small aperture made into a cavity (Ideal Blackbody). We show that an expression very similar to Hawking's temperature determines a temperature below which an aperture in a cavity cannot be considered as standard blackbody radiating like T^4. Hawking's radiation therefore appear as a radiation at a typical wavelength which is of the size of the horizon radius. In a second part, we make the analogy between the emission of particle-anti particle pairs near the black hole horizon and the scattering and coupling of thermally populated evanescent waves by a nano objects. We show here again that a temperature similar to the Hawking temperature determines the regimes where the scattering occur or where it is negligible.

We propose in this article a method to generate radiative coolers which are reflective in the solar spectrum and emissive in the transparency window of the atmosphere (8-13 $\mu$m). We choose an approach combining thermal control capacity of gratings and multi-layers. We use optimized BN, SiC and SiO 2 gratings, which have emissivity peak in the transparency window. We place under these gratings a metal/dielectric multi-layer structure to obtain a near perfect reflectivity in the solar spectrum and to enhance the emissivity in the transparency window. The optimized structures produce a good radiative cooling power density up to 80 W.m --2 .

We study a near-field radiative thermal transistor analogous to an electronic one made of a VO 2 base placed between two silica semi-infinite plates playing the roles of the transistor collector and emitter. The fact that VO 2 exhibits an insulator to metal transition is exploited to modulate and/or amplify heat fluxes between the emitter and the collector, by applying a thermal current on the VO 2 base. We study the transistor behavior in 4 typical regimes where the emitter-base and base-collector separation distances can be larger or smaller than the thermal wavelength, and in which the VO 2 layer can be opaque or transparent. Thermal currents variations with the base temperatures are calculated and analyzed. An optimum configuration for base thickness and separation distance maximizing the thermal transistor modulation factor is found.

We study in this article how heat can be exchanged between two level systems (TLS) each of them being coupled to a thermal reservoir. Calculation are performed solving a master equation for the density matrix using the Born markov-approximation. We analyse the conditions for which a thermal diode and a thermal transistor can be obtained as well as their optimization., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1602.04175

Controlling the temperature in architectures involving nanoparticles and substrates is a key issue for applications involving micro and nanoscale heat transfer. We study the thermal behavior of a single nanoparticle interacting with a flat substrate under external monochromatic illumination, and with thermal radiation as the unique heat loss channel. We develop a model to compute the temperature of the nanoparticle, based on an effective dipole-polarizability approach. Using numerical simulations, we thoroughly investigate the impacts of various parameters affecting the nanoparticle temperature, such as the nanoparticle-to-substrate gap distance, the incident light wavelength and polarization, or the material resonances. This study provides a tool for the thermal characterization and design of micro or nanoscale systems coupling substrates with nanoparticles or optical antennas., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures

We demonstrate that a thermal transistor can be made up with a quantum system of 3 interacting subsystems , coupled to a thermal reservoir each. This thermal transistor is analogous to an electronic bipolar one with the ability to control the thermal currents at the collector and at the emitter with the imposed thermal current at the base. This is achieved determining the heat fluxes by means of the strong-coupling formalism. For the case of 3 interacting spins, in which one of them is coupled to the other 2, that are not directly coupled, it is shown that high amplification can be obtained in a wide range of energy parameters and temperatures. The proposed quantum transistor could, in principle, be used to develop devices such as a thermal modulator and a thermal amplifier in nano systems., Comment: Physical Review Letters, American Physical Society, 2016, 116, pp.200601

We calculate, by means of fluctuational electrodynamics, the thermal emission of an aperture filled by vacuum or a material at temperature T. We show that thermal emission is very different whether the aperture size is large or small compared to the thermal wavelength. Subwavelength apertures filled with vacuum (subwavelength blackbody) have their thermal emission strongly decreased compared to classical blackbodies. A simple expression of their emissivity can be calculated and their total emittance scales as T 8 instead of T 4 for large apertures. Thermal emission of disk of materials with a size comparable to the wavelength is also discussed. It is shown in particular that emissivity of such a disk is increased when the material can support surface waves such as phonon polaritons.

This paper proposes an experiment to easily detect radiative heat transfer in the microwave range. Following an idea given by Pendry more than a decade ago [1], we show that a 3D array of tungsten 2micron radius wires with a 1 cm period makes a low cost material exhibiting a surface plasmon in the microwave range around 2.9 GHz. Such a heated material should exhibit an emission peak near the plasmon frequency well above ambient emission. Analysis of the signal detected in the near-field should also be a tool to analyze how homogenization theory applies when the distance to the material is of the order of the metamaterial period. It could also be give a model to non-local dielectric properties in the same conditions., Comment: in 7th International Symposium on Radiative Transfer, Jun 2013, Kusadaci, Turkey. 2013

We study in this work the near-field radiative heat transfer between two semi-infinite parallel planes of highly n-doped semiconductors. Using a nonlocal model of the dielectric permittivity, usually used for the case of metallic planes, we show that the radiative heat transfer coefficientsaturates as the separation distance is reduced for high doping concentration. These results replace the 1/d${}^2$ infinite divergence obtained in the local model case. Different features of the obtained results are shown to relate physically to the parameters of the materials, mainly the doping concentration and the plasmon frequency.

We explore in the present work the near-field radiative heat transfer between two semi-infinite parallel nonlocal dielectric planes by means of fluctuational electrodynamics. We use atheory for the nonlocal dielectric permittivityfunction proposed byHalevi and Fuchs. This theory has the advantage to includedifferent models performed in the literature. According to this theory, the nonlocal dielectric function is described by a Lorenz-Drude like single oscillator model, in which the spatial dispersion effects are represented by an additional term depending on the square of the total wavevector k. The theory takes into account the scattering of the electromagneticexcitation at the surface of the dielectric material, which leads to the need of additional boundary conditions in order to solve Maxwell's equations and treat the electromagnetic transmission problem. The additional boundary conditions appear as additional surface scattering parameters in the expressions of the surface impedances. It is shown that the nonlocal modeling deviates from the classical $1/d^2$ law in the nanometerrangeat distances still larger than the ones where quantum effects are expected to come into play.

By means of fluctuationnal electrodynamics, we calculate radiative heat flux between two pla-nar materials respectively made of SiC and SiO2. More specifically, we focus on a first (direct) situation where one of the two materials (for example SiC) is at ambient temperature whereas the second material is at a higher one, then we study a second (reverse) situation where the material temperatures are inverted. When the two fluxes corresponding to the two situations are different, the materials are said to exhibit a thermal rectification, a property with potential applications in thermal regulation. Rectification variations with temperature and separation distance are here reported. Calculations are performed using material optical data experimentally determined by Fourier transform emission spectrometry of heated materials between ambient temperature (around 300 K) and 1480 K. It is shown that rectification is much more important in the near-field domain, i.e. at separation distances smaller than the thermal wavelength. In addition, we see that the larger is the temperature difference, the larger is rectification. Large rectification is finally interpreted due to a weakening of the SiC surface polariton when temperature increases, a weakening which affects much less SiO2 resonances.

We show in this article that phase change materials (PCM) exhibiting a phase transition between a dielectric state and a metallic state are good candidates to perform modulation as well as amplification of radiative thermal flux. We propose a simple situation in plane parallel geometry where a so-called radiative thermal transistor could be achieved. In this configuration, we put a PCM between two blackbodies at different temperatures. We show that the transistor effect can be achieved easily when this material has its critical temperature between the two blackbody temperatures. We also see, that the more the material is reflective in the metallic state, the more switching effect is realized whereas the more PCM transition is stiff in temperature, the more thermal amplification is high. We finally take the example of VO2 that exhibits an insulator-metallic transition at 68{\textdegree}C. We show that a demonstrator of a radiative transistor could easily be achieved in view of the heat flux levels predicted. Far-field thermal radiation experiments are proposed to back the results presented.

The natural transition from the radiative regime to the conductive regime of heat transfer between two identical isotropic dielectric solid materials, is questioned by investigating the possibility of induced phonon transfer in vacuum. We describe the process in a general way assuming a certain phonon coupling mechanism between the two identical solids, then we particularly illustrate the case of coupling through Casimir force. We analyze how this mechanism of heat transfer compares and competes with the near field thermal radiation using a local model of the dielectric function. We show that the former mechanism can be very effective and even overpass the latter mechanism depending on the nature of the solid dielectric materials, the distance gap between them as well as the operating temperature regime., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures and 1 table

Thermal rectification phenomenon is a manifestation of an asymmetry in the heat flux when the temperature difference between two interacting thermal reservoirs is reversed. In this letter, we present a far-field radiative thermal rectifier based on high temperature superconducting materials with a rectification ratio up to $80%$. This value is among the highest reported in literature. Two configurations are examined : a superconductor (Tl$_2$Ba$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_8$) exchanging heat with 1) a black body and 2) another superconductor, YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_7$ in this case. The first configuration shows a higher maximal rectification ratio. Besides, we show that the two superconductors rectifier exhibits different rectification regimes depending on the choice of the reference temperature, i.e the temperature of the thermostat. Presented results might be useful for energy conversion devices, efficient cryogenic radiative insulators engineering and thermal logical circuits development., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Applied Physics Letters

We analyze how a probing particle modifies the infrared electromagnetic near field of a sample. The particle, described by electric and magnetic polarizabilities, represents the tip of an apertureless scanning optical near-field microscope (SNOM). We show that the interaction with the sample can be accounted for by ascribing to the particle dressed polarizabilities that combine the effects of image dipoles with retardation. When calculated from these polarizabilities, the SNOM signal depends only on the fields without the perturbing tip. If the studied surface is not illuminated by an external source but heated instead, the signal is closely related to the projected electromagnetic local density of states (EM-LDOS). Our calculations provide the link between the measured far-field spectra and the sample's optical properties.We also analyze the case where the probing particle is hotter than the sample and evaluate the impact of the dressed polarizabilities on near-field radiative heat transfer. We show that such a heated probe above a surface performs a surface spectroscopy, in the sense that the spectrum of the heat current is closely related to the local electromagnetic density of states. The calculations agree well with available experimental data., Comment: Soumis \`a JQSRT. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1201.4834

We present a thermal rectification device concept based on far-field radiative exchange between two selective emitters. Rectification is achieved due to the fact that one of the selective emitters radiative properties are independent on temperature whereas the other emitter properties are strongly temperature dependent. A simple device constituted by two multilayer samples made of metallic (Au) and semiconductor (Si and HDSi) thin films is proposed. This device shows a rectification up to 70% with a temperature difference \Delta T = 200 K, a rectification ratio that has never been achieved so far with radiation-based rectifiers. Further optimization would allow larger rectification values. Presented results might be useful for energy conversion devices, smart radiative coolers / insulators engineering and thermal modulators development., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures

Heat-transport mechanism mediated by near-field interactions in plasmonic nanostructures networks is shown to be analogous to a generalized random-walk process. Existence of superdiffusive regimes is demonstrated both in linear ordered chains and in three dimensional random networks by analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the corresponding probability distribution function. We show that the spread of heat in these networks is described by a type of L\'{e}vy flight. The presence of such anomalous heat transport regimes in plasmonic networks opens the way to the design of a new generation of composite materials able to transport heat faster than the normal diffusion process in solids., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

The paper discusses the fundamental behavior of the dynamical lattice thermal conductivity k(W) of bulk cubic semiconductor crystals. The calculation approach is based on solving Boltzmann-Peierls Phonon Transport Equation in the frequency domain after excitation by a dynamical temperature gradient, within the framework of the single relaxation time approximation and using modified Debye-Callaway model. Our model allows us to obtain a compact expression for k(W) that captures the leading behavior of the dynamical thermal conduction by phonons. This expression fulfills the causality requirement and leads to a convolution type relationship between the heat flux density current and the temperature gradient in the real space-time domain in agreement with Gurtin-Pipkin theory. The dynamical behavior of k(W) is studied by changing ambient temperature as well as different intrinsic and extrinsic parameters including the effect of embedding semiconductor nanoparticles as extrinsic phonon scattering centers. The paper investigates also the applicability of Shastry Sum Rule and the possibility of existence and propagation of second sound in the frame work of Boltzmann theory., Comment: 76 pages and 15 figures

A parametric study of Drude and Lorentz models performances in maximizing near-field radiative heat transfer between two semi-infinite planes separated by nanometric distances at room temperature is presented in this paper. Optimal parameters of these models that provide optical properties maximizing the radiative heat flux are reported and compared to real materials usually considered in similar studies, silicon carbide and heavily doped silicon in this case. Results are obtained by exact and approximate (in the extreme near-field regime and the electrostatic limit hypothesis) calculations. The two methods are compared in terms of accuracy and CPU resources consumption. Their differences are explained according to a mesoscopic description of near-field radiative heat transfer. Finally, the frequently assumed hypothesis which states a maximal radiative heat transfer when the two semi-infinite planes are of identical materials is numerically confirmed. Its subsequent practical constraints are then discussed., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Journal of Physics D : Applied Physics

Among several solutions to exploit solar energy, thermophotovoltaics (TPV) have been popularized and have known great breakthroughs during the past two decades. Yet, existing systems still have low efficiencies since the wavelength range of optimal photovoltaic (PV) conversion is very small compared to the emitter spectral range. Selective emitters are a very promising solution to this problem. We developed numerical tools to design and optimize such emitters. Some of the resulting structures composed of two or four layers of metals and semiconductors are presented in this paper. We also show that the usual PV devices efficiency limits (30% for crystalline silicon under solar radiation, according to Shockley-Queisser model) can be easily overcome thanks to these structures., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

We analyse how a probing particle modifies infrared electromagnetic near fields. The particle, assimilated to both electric and magnetic dipoles, represents the tip of an apertureless scanning optical near-field microscope (SNOM). We show that the interaction can be accounted for by ascribing to the particle effective dipole polarizabilities that add the effect of retardation to the one of the image dipole. Apart from these polarizabilities, the SNOM signal expression depends only on the fields without tip perturbation, shown to be closely related to the electromagnetic density of states (EM-LDOS) and essentially linked to the sample's optical properties, so that measuring local spectra of heated samples is equivalent to performing a local surface spectroscopy. We also analyse the case where the probing particle is hotter. We evaluate in this case the impact of the effective polarizabilities on the tip-sample near-field radiative heat transfer. We also show that such an heated probe above a surface also performs a surface spectroscopy. The calculations agree well with available experimental data.

In this Letter a N-body theory for the radiative heat exchange in thermally non equilibrated discrete systems of finite size objects is presented. We report strong exaltation effects of heat flux which can be explained only by taking into account the presence of many body interactions. Our theory extends the standard Polder and van Hove stochastic formalism used to evaluate heat exchanges between two objects isolated from their environment to a collection of objects in mutual interaction. It gives a natural theoretical framework to investigate the photon heat transport properties of complex systems at mesoscopic scale.

We present a theoretical study of near-field heat transfer between two anisotropic materials separated by a small vacuum gap and maintained in a stationary non-equilibrium thermal situation. By combining standard stochastic electrodynamics and the Maxwell-Garnett description for effective media, we show that heat flux can be significantly enhanced by air inclusions. This result is explained by : (a) the presence of extraordinary surface waves that give rise to supplementary channels for heat transfer throughout the gap, (b) an increase in the contribution given by the ordinary surface waves at resonance, (c) and the appearance of frustrated modes over a broad spectral range.

A recently developed Shastry's formalism for energy transport is used to analyze the temporal and spatial behaviors of the energy and heat transport in metals under delta function excitation at the surface. Comparison with Cattaneo's model is performed. Both models show the transition between nonthermal (ballistic) and thermal (ballistic-diffusive) regimes. Furthermore, because the new model considers the discrete character of the lattice, it highlights some new phenomena such as damped oscillations in the energy transport both in time and space. The energy relaxation of the conduction band electrons in metals is considered to be governed by the electron-phonon scattering, and the scattering time is taken to be averaged over the Fermi surface. Using the new formalism, one can quantify the transfer from nonthermal modes to thermal ones as energy propagates in the material and it is transformed into heat. While the thermal contribution shows a wave-front and an almost exponentially decaying behavior with time, the nonthermal part shows a wave-front and a damped oscillating behavior. Two superimposed oscillations are identified; a fast oscillation that is attributed to the nonthermal nature of energy transport at very short time scales and a slow oscillation that describes the nature of the transition from the nonthermal regime to the thermal regime of energy transport., Comment: 60pages, 2 tables and 11 figures

We investigate energy and momentum non-contact exchanges between two arbitrary flat media separated by a gap. This problem is revisited as a transmission problem of individual system eigenmodes weighted by a transmission probability obtained either from fluctuational electrodynamics or quantum field theory. An upper limit for energy and momentum flux is derived using a general variational approach. The corresponding optimal reflectivity coefficients are given both for identical and different media in interaction., Comment: accepted in Phys. Rev. B rapid communication

We theoretically investigate the non-radiative heat transfer between two photonic crystals separated by a small gap in non-equilibrium thermal situation. We predict that the surface Bloch states coupling supported by these media can make heat exchanges larger than those measured at the same separation distance between two massive homogeneous materials made with the elementary components of photonic crystals. These results could find broad applications in near-field technologies., Comment: submitted to Applied Physics Letters

The ability to artificially grow in a controllable manner at nanoscale, from modern deposition techniques, complex structural configurations made with metallic, polar and semiconductors materials raises today the issue of the "best" achievable inner structure to tailor the near-field properties of a nanostructured medium. In the present work we make a step towards the rational design of these materials by reporting numerical experimentations demonstrating the possibility of identifying structural configurations of layered metallodielectric media specifically designed to control the electromagnetic density of states in the close vicinity of their surface. These results could find broad applications in near-field technologies., Comment: to appear in Appl. Phys. Lett

We study heat transport in semiconductor nanostructures by solving the Boltzmann Transport Equation (BTE) by means of the Discrete Ordinate Method (DOM). Relaxation time and phase and group velocitiy spectral dependencies are taken into account. The Holland model of phonon relaxation time is revisited and recalculated from dispersion relations (taken in litterature) in order to match bulk silicon and germanium values. This improved model is then used to predict silicon nanowire and nanofilm thermal properties in both ballistic and mesoscopic regimes.

We study quasi-ballistic heat transfer through air between a hot nanometer-scale tip and a sample. The hot tip/surface configuration is widely used to perform nonintrusive confined heating. Using a Monte-Carlo simulation, we find that the thermal conductance reaches 0.8 MW.m-2K-1 on the surface under the tip and show the shape of the heat flux density distribution (nanometer-scale thermal spot). These results show that a surface can be efficiently heated locally without contact. The temporal resolution of the heat transfer is a few tens of picoseconds., Comment: 4 pages

We study the heat transfer between two parallel metallic semi-infinite media with a gap in the nanometer-scale range. We show that the near-field radiative heat flux saturates at distances smaller than the metal skin depth when using a local dielectric constant and investigate the origin of this effect. The effect of non-local corrections is analysed using the Lindhard-Mermin and Boltzmann-Mermin models. We find that local and non-local models yield the same heat fluxes for gaps larger than 2 nm. Finally, we explain the saturation observed in a recent experiment as a manifestation of the skin depth and show that heat is mainly dissipated by eddy currents in metallic bodies., Comment: Version without figures (8 figures in the complete version)

We report a numerical investigation on the heat transfer through one dimensional arrays of metallic nanoparticles closely spaced in a host material. Our simulations show that the multipolar interactions play a crucial role in the heat transport via collective plasmons. Calculations of the plasmonic thermal conductance and of the thermal conductivity in ballistic and diffusive regime, respectively have been carried out. (a) Using the Landauer-Buttiker formalism we have found that, when the host material dielectric constant takes positive values, the multipolar interactions drastically enhance by several order of magnitude the ballistic thermal conductance of collective plasmons compared with that of a classical dipolar chain. On the contrary, when the host material dielectric constant takes negative values, we have demonstrated the existence of non-ballistic multipolar modes which annihilate the heat transfer through the chains. (b) Using the kinetic theory we have also examined the thermal behavior of chains in the diffusion approximation. We have shown that the plasmonic thermal conductivity of metallic nanoparticle chains can reach 1% of the bulk metal thermal conductivity . This result could explain the anomalously high thermal conductivity observed in many collo\"idal suspensions, the so called nanofluids., Comment: 10 pages, PRB

The coherence length of the thermal electromagnetic field near a planar surface has a minimum value related to the nonlocal dielectric response of the material. We perform two model calculations of the electric energy density and the field's degree of spatial coherence. Above a polar crystal, the lattice constant gives the minimum coherence length. It also gives the upper limit to the near field energy density, cutting off its $1/z^3$ divergence. Near an electron plasma described by the semiclassical Lindhard dielectric function, the corresponding length scale is fixed by plasma screening to the Thomas-Fermi length. The electron mean free path, however, sets a larger scale where significant deviations from the local description are visible., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure files (.eps), \documentclass[global]{svjour}, accepted in special issue "Optics on the Nanoscale" (Applied Physics B, eds. V. Shalaev and F. Tr\"ager)

Heat transport at nanoscales in semiconductors is investigated with a statistical method. The Boltzmann Transport Equation (BTE) which characterize phonons motion and interaction within the crystal lattice has been simulated with a Monte Carlo technique. Our model takes into account media frequency properties through the dispersion curves for longitudinal and transverse acoustic branches. The BTE collisional term involving phonons scattering processes is simulated with the Relaxation Times Approximation theory. A new distribution function accounting for the collisional processes has been developed in order to respect energy conservation during phonons scattering events. This non deterministic approach provides satisfactory results in what concerns phonons transport in both ballistic and diffusion regimes. The simulation code has been tested with silicon and germanium thin films; temperature propagation within samples is presented and compared to analytical solutions (in the diffusion regime). The two materials bulk thermal conductivity is retrieved for temperature ranging between 100 K and 500 K. Heat transfer within a plane wall with a large thermal gradient (250 K-500 K) is proposed in order to expose the model ability to simulate conductivity thermal dependence on heat exchange at nanoscales. Finally, size effects and validity of heat conduction law are investigated for several slab thicknesses.

We review in this article the influence of surface waves on the thermally excited electromagnetic field. We study in particular the field emitted at subwalength distances of material surfaces. After reviewing the main properties of surface waves, we introduce the fluctuation-dissipation theorem that allows to model the fluctuating electromagnetic fields. We then analyse the contribution of these waves in a variety of phenomena. They give a leading contribution to the density of electromagnetic states, they produce both temporal coherence and spatial coherence in the near field of planar thermal sources. They can be used to modify radiative properties of surfaces and to design partially spatially coherent sources. Finally, we discuss the role of surface waves in the radiative heat transfer and the theory of dispersion forces at the subwavelength scale., Comment: Redig\'{e} \`{a} la fin de l'ann\'{e}e 2004. Accept\'{e} dans Surface Science Reports

We establish strict upper limits for the Casimir interaction between multilayered structures of arbitrary dielectric or diamagnetic materials. We discuss the appearance of different power laws due to frequency-dependent material constants. Simple analytical expressions are in good agreement with numerical calculations based on Lifshitz theory. We discuss the improvements required for current (meta) materials to achieve a repulsive Casimir force., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, graphicx, v4: Europhysics Letters, in press

The Casimir force between metallic plates made of realistic materials is evaluated for distances in the nanometer range. A spectrum over real frequencies is introduced and shows narrow peaks due to surface resonances (plasmon polaritons or phonon polaritons) that are coupled across the vacuum gap. We demonstrate that the Casimir force originates from the attraction (repulsion) due to the corresponding symmetric (antisymmetric) eigenmodes, respectively. This picture is used to derive a simple analytical estimate of the Casimir force at short distances. We recover the result known for Drude metals without absorption and compute the correction for weakly absorbing materials., Comment: revised version submitted to Phys. Rev. A, 06 November 2003