Thermal radiation from metal surfaces

Abstract

The thermal radiation from metals is calculated by including the Holstein processes of phonon-assisted and surface-assisted scattering in the free-electron model. This approach provides a fairly accurate description of the experimentally measured total emissivity of good conductors in terms of the dc resistivity and the radius of the free-electron sphere. These calculations do not support the Foote and Davisson–Weeks-type equations which have been used previously.