High Temperature Thermal Photonics

TL;DR

This review discusses advances in high temperature thermal photonics, focusing on controlling thermal radiation spectrum, polarization, and directionality using engineered materials and photonic structures for energy and sensing applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of materials, photonic platforms, and applications in high temperature thermal photonics, highlighting recent progress and future challenges.

Findings

Identification of candidate materials with polaritonic/plasmonic properties and high temperature stability.

Analysis of photonic platforms like meta-gratings, photonic crystals, and metamaterials.

Overview of applications such as thermophotovoltaics and radiative cooling.

Abstract

Controlling and detecting thermal radiation is of vital importance for varied applications ranging from energy conversion systems and nanoscale information processing devices to infrared imaging, spectroscopy and sensing. We review the field of high temperature thermal photonics which aims to control the spectrum, polarization, tunability, switchability and directionality of heat radiation from engineered materials in extreme environments. We summarize the candidate materials which are being pursued by the community that have simultaneous polaritonic/plasmonic properties as well as high temperature stability. We also provide a detailed discussion of the common photonic platforms including meta-gratings, photonic crystals, and metamaterials used for thermal emission engineering. We review broad applications including thermophotovoltaics, high temperature radiative cooling, thermal radiation sources, and noisy nanoscale thermal devices. By providing an overview of the recent achievements in this field, we hope this review can accelerate progress to overcome major outstanding problems in modern thermal engineering.