Hot soup in a thermos is surrounded by a vacuum between the inner and outer walls, which prevents heat from conducting directly through the sides, as it would if the walls were a one-piece solid. But the soup still loses heat by “glowing” in infrared light because the light radiated through the walls takes energy away with it.
Shanhui Fan of Stanford University in California and his colleagues wondered if photonic crystals–periodic structures famous for blocking narrow frequency ranges of light–could block the broad range of infrared frequencies radiated by a warm body.
swans on tea
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