Planck's blackbody radiation law is proved untrue at nanoscale distances

[mark1]

A well-established physical law describes the transfer of heat between two objects, but some physicists have long predicted that the law should break down when the objects are very close together. Scientists had never been able to confirm, or measure, this breakdown in practice. For the first time, however, MIT researchers have achieved this feat, and determined that the heat transfer can be 1,000 times greater than the law predicts.

The new findings could lead to significant new applications, including better design of the recording heads of the hard disks used for computer data storage, and new kinds of devices for harvesting energy from heat that would otherwise be wasted.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/heat-0729.html"

 

[Redbelly98]

Thanks for posting that!

I wonder what the explanation is for this. Perhaps induced dipole moments between charges in the two objects when they are close enough to each other, somehow increases the radiative transfer rate?