Tailoring the emission spectra of a thermophotovoltaic emitter away from that of a blackbody has the potential to minimize transmission and thermalization loss in a photovoltaic receiver. Selective thermophotovoltaic emitters could lead to solar energy conversion with efficiency greater than the Shockley-Queisser limit and could facilitate the generation of useful energy from waste heat. We introduce a new design to radically tune thermal emission that leverages the interplay between two resonant phenomena in a simple planar structure – absorption in weakly-absorbing thin films and reflection in multi-layer dielectric stacks. We will discuss a virtual screening approach based on Pareto optimality to identify a small number of promising structures for a selective thermal emitter from a search space of millions, several of which approach the ideal values of a step-function selective thermal emitter. We will also discuss the experimental realization of several simple and optimal structures, estimates of their device-level performance, and ongoing efforts to close the gap between theoretical estimates and experimentally-realized performance of these structures.
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