Phys.org February 26, 2020 Researchers at Stanford University sought to imagine a new type of cooling device that would work by reversing the heat exchange between an object and its environment by adding energy to radiated photons—in theory, doing so should carry away more heat. They developed theoretical and computational formalisms to describe thermal radiation from temporally modulated systems. They showed that such a modulation results in a photon-based active cooling mechanism. This mechanism has a high thermodynamic performance that can approach the Carnot limit. The work points to exciting new avenues in active, time-modulated control of thermal emission for […]