Planck's law of radiative heat transfer fails at nanoscale
Date: Wednesday, September 05, 2018 @ 08:57:53 UTC
Topic: Science
 From Sciencealert.com: Planck's law of radiative heat transfer has held up well under a century of intense testing, but a new analysis has found it fails on the smallest of scales.
Exactly what this means isn't all that clear yet, but where laws fail, new discoveries can follow. Such a find wouldn't just affect physics on an atomic scale – it could impact everything from climate models to our understanding of planetary formation.
The foundational law of quantum physics was recently put to the test by researchers from William & Mary in Virginia and the University of Michigan, who were curious about whether the age-old rule could describe the way heat radiation was emitted by nanoscale objects.
Not only does the law fail, the experimental result is 100 times greater than the predicted figure, suggesting nanoscale objects can emit and absorb heat with far greater efficiency than current models can explain.
"That's the thing with physics," says William & Mary physicist Mumtaz Qazilbash.
"It's important to experimentally measure something, but also important to actually understand what is going on."
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