Large Scale Optical Metamaterials for Energy and Sustainability

Micro/nano-structured metamaterials offer significantly new opportunities for high efficiency devices and systems for energy harvesting, conversion and storage. There is, however, a tremendous gap between the proof-of-principle demonstrations at small scale and the intrinsically large scale real-world energy systems and sustainable applications. In this talk, I will give an overview of our research and, more specifically, present our recent development on how judiciously structured photonic materials address the challenge of the tremendous power hungry for space cooling and promote photosynthesis and crop yield in greenhouses.