Thermal-emission engineering: active control and advanced temperature sensing

Abstract

There is a growing interest in engineering of thermal emitters using metamaterials concepts for applications in energy harvesting, radiative cooling, and thermal camouflage. This talk will describe our efforts to achieve ultrafast control of thermal emission via engineered free-carrier dynamics in semiconductors, resulting in the generation of thermal pulses on nanosecond and picosecond scales. Then, this talk will introduce a metrology method that can remotely measure the three-dimensional temperature distributions of target objects, based on careful analysis of light thermally emitted from that object.