A team of MIT researchers has developed a way of making a high-temperature version of a kind of materials called photonic crystals, using metals such as tungsten or tantalum. The new materials—which can operate at temperatures up to 1,200°C—could find a wide variety of applications powering portable electronic devices, spacecraft to probe deep space, and new infrared light emitters that could be used as chemical detectors and sensors.

Compared to earlier attempts to make high-temperature photonic crystals, the new approach is “higher performance, simpler, robust, and amenable to inexpensive large-scale production,” says Ivan Celanovic, senior author of a paper describing the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the multidisciplinary scientific serial. The paper was co-authored by MIT professors John Joannopoulos and Marin Soljačić, graduate students Yi Xiang Yeng and Walker Chen, affiliate Michael Ghebrebrhan, and former postdoc Peter Bermel.

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