Modeling and investigating the thermalization of microscopic objects with arbitrary shape from first principles is of fundamental interest and may lead to technical applications. In this talk, I will report on a study of the thermalization dynamics due to far-field heat radiation of an individual, deterministically produced silica fiber with a predetermined shape and a diameter smaller than the thermal wavelength. The temperature change of the subwavelength-diameter fiber is determined through a measurement of its optical path length in conjunction with an ab initio thermodynamic model of the fiber structure. Our results show excellent agreement with a theoretical model that considers heat radiation as a volumetric effect and takes the emitter shape and size relative to the emission wavelength into account.
[1] C. Wuttke and A. Rauschenbeutel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 024301 (2013).