Data-driven design of multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials for near-field thermal radiative modulator with high modulation contrast

The thermal modulator based on the near-field radiative heat transfer has wide applications in thermoelectric diodes, thermoelectric transistors, and thermal storage. However, the design of optimal near-field thermal radiation structure is a complex and challenging problem due to the tremendous number of degrees of freedom. In this work, we have proposed a data-driven machine learning workflow to efficiently design multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials composed of ${\alpha}$-MoO$_{\rm 3}$ for near-field thermal radiative modulator with high modulation contrast. By combining the multilayer perceptron and Bayesian optimization, the rotation angle, layer thickness and gap distance of the multilayer metamaterials are optimized to achieve a maximum thermal modulation contrast ratio of 6.29. This represents a 97% improvement compared to previous single layer structure. The large thermal modulation contrast is mainly attributed to the alignment and misalignment of hyperbolic plasmon polaritons and hyperbolic surface phonon polaritons of each layer controlled by the rotation. The results provide a promising way for accelerating the designing and manipulating of near-field radiative heat transfer by anisotropic hyperbolic materials through the data-driven style.