A Review on the Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs in Thermal Emission Engineering

The emission of thermal radiation is a physical process of fundamental and technological interest. From different approaches, thermal radiation can be regarded either as one of the basic mechanisms of heat transfer, as a fundamental quantum phenomenon of photon production, or as the propagation of electromagnetic waves. However, unlike light emanating from conventional photonic sources, such as lasers or antennas, thermal radiation is characterized for being broadband, omnidirectional, and unpolarized. Due to these features, ultimately tied to its inherently incoherent nature, taming the thermal radiation constitutes a challenging issue. Latest advances in the field of nanophotonics have led to a whole set of artificial platforms, ranging from spatially structured materials, and much more recently, time-modulated media, offering promising avenues for enhancing the control and manipulation of electromagnetic waves, from far to near-field regimes. Given the ongoing parallelism between the fields of nanophotonics and thermal emission, these recent developments have been harnessed to deal with radiative thermal processes, thereby conforming the current basis of thermal emission engineering. In this review, we survey some of the main breakthroughs carried out in this burgeoning research field, from fundamental aspects, theoretical limits, the emergence of new phenomena, practical applications, challenges, and future prospects.