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APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 102 » Issue 18
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 187402 (2009) [4 pages]

Probing Planck’s Law with Incandescent Light Emission from a Single Carbon Nanotube

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Yuwei Fan, S. B. Singer, Raymond Bergstrom, and B. C. Regan*
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095 and California NanoSystems Institute, Los Angeles, California, 90095

Received 18 January 2009; published 5 May 2009

We present thermal and electron micrographs of an incandescent lamp constructed from a multiwalled carbon nanotube, and correlate the subwavelength optical information with the underlying nanoscopic structure. Remarkably, the heat equation and Planck’s law together give a precise, quantitative description of the light intensity as a function of input power, even though the nanotube’s small size places it outside the thermodynamic limit.

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.187402
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.187402
PACS:
82.60.Qr, 05.30.−d, 65.80.+n, 78.67.Ch

*regan@physics.ucla.edu

 
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