Electrically tunable cavity-coupled conducting polymer plasmonic antenna arrays for adaptive radiative cooling

Radiative cooling provides a sustainable solution for reducing the growing global energy consumption, particularly in cooling buildings which today alone constitutes around 10% of the global electricity consumption. In brief, radiative cooling spontaneously cools objects by radiating heat (thermal emission) to the cold outer space. While intense research has focused on developing materials with high radiative cooling efficiency, less attention has been paid on the need to be able to regulate the cooling power to adopt to varying outdoor temperature conditions. The host group recently demonstrated tuning of radiative cooling based on varying the redox-state of a conducting polymer thin film, but still with modest emissivity tuning of 25-40%. This project aims to significantly improve upon such tuning capability by introducing a novel concept which couples a Fabry-Perot optical cavity to a conducting polymer plasmonic antenna arrays. We aim to achieve near-perfect thermal emission in the oxidized (metallic) state of the polymer and to essentially switch off the thermal emission by electrically switching the polymer mirror and antennas to their reduced (dielectric) state.