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To address the escalating global demand for sustainable thermal management, we designed an aluminum‐doped zinc oxide (AZO)‐based composite coating using plasmonic engineering and evaluated its radiative cooling performance. Al‐doping of ZnO produced AZO nanoparticles (NPs) with significantly reduced electrical resistivity and a high carrier concentration, activating strong localized surface plasmon resonance directly within the critical 8–13 μm atmospheric window. This overcomes the spectral limitations of high‐resistivity materials, enabling spectrally selective and significantly enhanced infrared emissivity controlled by the Al dopant content. Dispersing the plasmonic AZO NPs within a porous polymer matrix exhibiting Mie scattering yields exceptional dual‐band performance, with a high solar reflectivity of 88.9% and an atmospheric window emissivity of 98.3% from a thin composite coating (15 μm). Outdoor evaluations demonstrate remarkable all‐day cooling with temperature reductions exceeding 25°C. The tunable spectral control of the AZO NPs and the scalable and low‐cost fabrication process of AZO‒Poly(methyl methacrylate) composite coatings provide a new design paradigm for the industrial application of radiative cooling coatings.
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Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.