Tunable pixelated graphene based thermal infrared emitter array and its electrothermal characterization

• Graphene as a promising 2-dimentional heating platform for thermal radiation control benefits from its extreme carrier mobility, transparency, and thermal conductivity. • Finite element analysis used to simulate a 5-by-3 graphene pixelated emitter array suggest localized heating area can be confined within micrometer size and reaches more than 10 K temperature rise within microseconds. • Experimental validation suggests that thermal emissions can be highly localized and reconfigurable both spatially and temporally, paving the way for developing nanoscale thermally driven device development. In this work, we design and fabricate tunable pixelated infrared emitter arrays based on graphene transistors. We use finite element analysis to simulate a 5-by-3 pixelated emitter array, where localized heating area can be confined within a size of 25 μm and reaches more than 10 K temperature rise within 3 μs. By applying fast sweeping scheme with electrostatic voltage inputs, tunable surface patterns assembling dynamic alphabetical letters of microscale sizes are demonstrated and captured via thermal mapping with its thermal emission variation caused by localized temperature rise. Our results show that thermal emission can be highly localized and reconfigurable both spatially and temporally, which paves the way for developing and boosting the performance of microscale and nanoscale thermally driven devices for communication, characterization, sensing and actuation.