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.
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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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