Angle-Selective Reflective Filters for Exclusion of Background Thermal Emission

Selective filtering of spectral and angular optical transmission has recently attracted a great deal of interest. While optical passband and stop-band spectral filters are already widely used, angle-selective transmission and reflection filtering represents a less than fully explored alternative. Nonetheless, this approach can be promising for several applications, including stray radiation minimization and background emission exclusion. In this work, a concept for angle-selective reflection filtering using guided-mode resonance coupling is proposed. Although guided-mode resonance structures are already used for spectral filtering, in this work, a variation of angle-selective reflection filtering using guided-mode resonance coupling is proposed. We investigate angle-dependent properties of such structures for potential use as angle-selective reflective filters. We utilize interference between diffraction modes to provide tunable selectivity with a sufficient angular width. Combining these structures with thermal emitters can exclude selected emission angles for spatially selective thermal emissivity reduction toward sensitive targets, as well as directionally selective emissivity exclusion for suppression of solar heating. We show a very large selective reduction of heat exchange by 99.77% between an engineered emitter and a distant receiver using just a single-groove grating and an emitting substrate in the emitter’s side. Also, we show a selective reduction of heat exchange by approximately 77% between an emitter covered by engineered sets of angle-selective reflective filters and a nearby sensitive target. The suggested angle-selective structure may have applications in excluding background thermal radiation, in particular, thermal emission reduction for daytime radiative cooling, sensitive IR telescope detectors, and high-fidelity thermoluminescent spectroscopy.