ACS Photonics special issue on Photonics for Energy
The journal ACS Photonics dedicates its latest special issue to Photonics for Energy, featuring an editorial by ICFO Professors Dr. Georgia Papadakis and Dr. Pelayo García de Arquer, together with Prof. Emiliano Cortés from the Nanoinstitute Munich.
Earth is powered by sunlight, and photonic sciences are crucial in the much-needed energy transition towards finding cleaner and greener alternative energy sources. That is how ICFO professors Dr. Georgia Papadakis and Dr. Pelayo García de Arquer open the editorial of the latest ACS Photonics special issue, dedicated to Photonics for Energy, that delves into how photonics contributes to harvesting solar and thermal energy to facilitate their direct conversion into electricity and chemical fuels. Both Professors Papadakis and García de Arquer are part of ICFO's Clean Planet Program, that aims to contribute to the mitigation of climate change by developing and implementing renewable, clean energy technologies.
The editorial reviews advances reported in the articles that constitute the issue, explaining how photonics has enabled outstanding breakthroughs in technologies such as photovoltaics by remarkably improving their efficiency, or have promoted the finding of new ways of concentrating sunlight while reducing the economic costs of solar electricity. It also goes over recent developments in the field of thermophotovoltaic systems, which convert heat into electricity; in recycling waste heat and using smart materials; in the use of plasmonic structures to catalyse chemical reactions to convert sunlight into fuels like hydrogen, or using spectroscopies to understand the functioning of energy devices.
Read the Editorial: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.4c00387
Read the issue here: https://pubs.acs.org/toc/apchd5/11/4