Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials 249 (2002) 462–465 Nanoscale radiative heating of a sample with a probe K. Joulain a,b, *, J.-P. Mulet a , R. Carminati a , J.-J. Greffet a a Laboratoire d’Energ ! etique Mol ! eculaire et Macroscopique, Combustion, CNRS, Ecole Centrale Paris, 92295 Ch # atenay-Malabry Cedex, France b Laboratoire d’Etudes thermiques, CNRS, BP 109, 86960 Futuroscope Cedex, France Abstract The purpose of this paper is to show that it is possible to transfer large amount of heat to a sample at a nanometer scale by approaching a probe such as those used in near-field microscopies. We evaluate the different heat exchange processes such as convective and radiative heat transfer. An application to local heating is discussed. r 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 44.40.+a; 07.79.v; 73.20.Mf Keywords: Radiative transfer; Collective excitations; Probe microscopes Controlling the temperature of a sample at a nanometer scale is an issue that could have important consequences on the development of nanotechnologies. The electronic chips are smaller and smaller. The removing of the heat dissipated by Joule effect in a micro-chip is a challenging problem [1]. The modelling of the radiative heat transfer between a tip and a substrate [2] is still questioned for all near-field microscopes (STM, AFM) or for scanning thermal microscopes (SThM) [3]. Furthermore, some materials are known to exhibit a vitreous transition above a Curie temperature T c : If a process was able to impose a temperature on a small scale, one can imagine using such materials for high-density data storage. Magneto-optical recording process could also be done in a different way. Instead of heating on a large scale and writing by applying a magnetic field in a small scale, one can imagine to apply a magnetic field at a large scale and writing by local heating. Recently, unexpected properties of the thermal radiation have been put into evidence at nanos- cales. For example, theoretical calculations have shown that the spectrum of emission of a heated sample may be very different depending on whether it is measured at a distance small or large compared to the wavelength of the maximum of the Planck function. When the sample is made of SiC, the spectrum of emission becomes almost monochromatic at a distance of a few tens of nanometers [4]. The signal is enhanced by four orders of magnitude compared to the one in the far field. This remarkable behaviour, which occurs also for other materials like glass or the II–VI and III–V semi-conductors, has important conse- quences when one is interested by the heat transfer. In the case of two semi-infinite bodies separated by a distance d ; the radiative heat transfer diverges *Corresponding author. 0304-8853/02/$-see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0304-8853(02)00472-9