Seminar on Thermal Photonics: Controlling Light and Heat for New Energy Applications

Assistant Professor Aaswath Raman

Nanoscale photonic structures, by their small length scales, can manipulate light and heat in unprecedented ways, thereby enabling new technological possibilities for energy efficiency and generation. In this talk, I will show how nanophotonic structures can control the broadband electromagnetic fields associated with mid-infrared thermal radiation and sunlight to harness an unexploited thermodynamic resource – the cold of space – to improve the efficiency of terrestrial energy conversion systems. I will introduce the concept of radiative sky cooling and present our body of theoretical and experimental results in enabling this passive cooling approach, and the result energy savings possible in real-world building-scale deployments. I will further show how it is possible to design artificial materials with specific wavelength and angular selectivity that can in turn enable remarkable performance, including passive cooling to 42°C below ambient. Applications to both energy efficiency as well as new energy generation possibilities will be presented. Finally, I will highlight new fundamental and applied research directions for controlling light and thermal radiation, particularly at mid-infrared wavelengths.

Aaswath Raman is Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research interests include nanophotonics, metamaterials, thermal sciences, energy systems, and machine learning. He is also Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of SkyCool Systems, a startup commercializing technology related to radiative sky cooling that he originally developed 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 Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction (2011), the SPIE Green Photonics Award (2011), the Stanford Postdoctoral Research Award (2013), the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35) Award (2015), the Materials Research Society's Robinson Award for Renewable Energy (2018), and the Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics (2019), and was an invited speaker at TED 2018.