  We describe a novel fluctuating-surface current formulation of radiative heat
transfer between bodies of arbitrary shape that exploits efficient and
sophisticated techniques from the surface-integral-equation formulation of
classical electromagnetic scattering. Unlike previous approaches to
non-equilibrium fluctuations that involve scattering matrices---relating
"incoming" and "outgoing" waves from each body---our approach is formulated in
terms of "unknown" surface currents, laying at the surfaces of the bodies, that
need not satisfy any wave equation. We show that our formulation can be applied
as a spectral method to obtain fast-converging semi-analytical formulas in
high-symmetry geometries using specialized spectral bases that conform to the
surfaces of the bodies (e.g. Fourier series for planar bodies or spherical
harmonics for spherical bodies), and can also be employed as a numerical method
by exploiting the generality of surface meshes/grids to obtain results in more
complicated geometries (e.g. interleaved bodies as well as bodies with sharp
corners). In particular, our formalism allows direct application of the
boundary-element method, a robust and powerful numerical implementation of the
surface-integral formulation of classical electromagnetism, which we use to
obtain results in new geometries, including the heat transfer between finite
slabs, cylinders, and cones.
