First Observations of Thermal Surface Energy and of the Thermal Evolution Process

Abstract

Using a developed technique of synchronous differential temperature measurements, the existence of the thermal surface energy (TSE) has been demonstrated with a huge signal-to-noise ratio in material artifacts, made of a homogeneous material, when these artefacts are irradiated by an external electromagnetic (EM) field. The TSE, presenting the energy of the oriented motion of the coupled field-particles system inside a solid-state artifact, is shown experimentally to be linearly related to the Poynting vector of the external EM field, and it results in the appearance of the thermal hysteresis effect, which is irreversible in time and has no symmetry in space. The experiments, presented in this paper, have shown that the principle of superposition is not valid for EM fields in case of TSE, so that the thermal evolution process, which inevitably includes the changing in time and in space the variations of the thermal surface energy, is characterized by the infinite number of correlated influence factors. It is shown experimentally that the dependences on time of the thermal evolution process are specific for any particular point on the artifact surface, and that the corresponding hysteresis effect at each point is characterized by its local time. It is found also that the properties of the material artifact, at any time moment in the Universal Coordinated Time, depend crucially on the choice of the observation point on the artifact surface, and the properties of the artifact at any point are continuously changing in time as a result of its interaction with the external EM field. The presented studies give an experimental confirmation of Niels Bohr's fundamental observation that, in the general case, the adequate description of material objects in terms of the isotropic and homogeneous concepts of time and space is not possible. The new concept of temperature, presented in the paper, as the energy of the field-particle system of a macroscopic material object, which can be detected by its EM radiation and which includes the oriented motion of this system, is sufficient for the description of the thermal surface energy and extends the notion of temperature to open systems, beyond the approximation of the thermodynamic equilibrium conditions.