- Oct 2024
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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This equality, formalized by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1860, is known as Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation and has long guided designs to control the emitted radiation. Removing the constraint of Kirchhoff’s law unlocks a multitude of applications and designs for thermal emitters. Decoupling the absorptivity and emissivity relationship can be leveraged to achieve novel functions, ranging from reducing re-emission losses to the Sun in the context of solar energy harvesting systems to radiative camouflage.
"Thermal emission has generally been thought to obey reciprocity, where the absorbed and emitted radiation from a body are equal for a given wavelength and angular channel."
This hypothesis is wrong. It is a serious problem that this law is maintained within the physics curriculum. Even if one does not care about verification (as seems to be an almost indredible notion but convictions of some well regarded serious physicists, nonetheless) it has also stifled innnovation as has now been shown by developing a solar energy based device that would have been precluded from consideration by this law. This law makes it to the CSwP (Citizen Scientists with Parity) top 10 list of consequential problems maintained simply by the dynamics of truth by consensus and authroity.
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