We study the heat transfer between two parallel metallic semi-infinite media with a gap in the nanometer-scale range. We show that the near-field radiative heat flux saturates at distances smaller than the metal skin depth when using a local dielectric constant and investigate the origin of this effect. The effect of nonlocal corrections is analyzed using the Lindhard-Mermin and Boltzmann-Mermin models. We find that local and nonlocal models yield the same heat fluxes for gaps larger than 20.3em0exnm. Finally, we explain the saturation observed in a recent experiment as a manifestation of the skin depth and show that heat is mainly dissipated by eddy currents in metallic bodies.
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Chapuis et al. (2008) studied this question.