Micro/Nanostructures for Far-Field Thermal Emission Control: An Overview

Engineering thermal emission using micro/nanostructures has received growing attention in recent years.A variety of novel coherent, directional, polarized and narrowband thermal light sources as well as wavelength selective emitters have been proposed and investigated.These emitters show a great potential in applications like thermophotovoltaics, solar energy concentration, radiative cooling, thermal detection, sensing, thermal camouflage, thermal rectification, etc.In this article, we give a review on the use of micro/nanostructures to control far-field thermal emission.Thermal emitters based on various micro/nanostructures including gratings, photonic crystals, metamaterials and metasurfaces are reviewed and some important applications are summarized.We expect this article can provide a general overview of this field.