When: Jan 30 2020 @ 3:00 PM
Where: Mergenthaler 111
Mergenthaler 111

“Thermal Photonics: Controlling the Light and Heat Around Us”
Presented by Professor Aaswath Raman
Materials Science and Engineering Department, UCLA
Metamaterials and nanoscale photonic structures, by their sub-wavelength feature sizes, can manipulate light and heat in unprecedented ways, thereby enabling new technological possibilities for energy efficiency and generation, heat transfer, sensing and imaging. In this talk, I will show how metamaterial and photonic approaches can control the broadband electromagnetic fields associated with thermal radiation – in particular the long-wave infrared thermal radiation associated with room temperatures – in unexpected ways to enable important new technological capabilities. I will introduce the concept of radiative sky cooling and present our pioneering body of theoretical and experimental results since 2013 that have enabled this passive cooling approach both during the day and night. Applications to building-scale energy efficiency as well as new energy generation possibilities, including electricity generation at night, will be highlighted. I will also discuss new experimental results that demonstrate broadband beaming of thermal radiation by exploiting epsilon-near-zero materials, as well as numerical work highlighting the energy savings potential of newly emerging tunable emissivity materials in the long-wave infrared. Finally, I will highlight new machine learning-driven approaches we have developed to facilitate the design of complex thermal photonic structures.
Aaswath Raman is Assistant Professor with the Materials Science and Engineering Department at UCLA. His research interests include nanophotonics, metamaterials, thermal sciences, energy systems, and machine learning. He is also Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of SkyCool Systems, a startup commercializing technology related to radiative sky cooling that he pioneered as a Research Associate at Stanford University. Aaswath received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2013, and his A.B. in Physics and Astronomy, and M.S. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2006. He is the recipient of the SPIE Green Photonics Award (2011), the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35) Award (2015), the Materials Research Society Robinson Award for Renewable Energy (2019), the Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics (2019), and was an invited speaker at TED 2018.