A Subambient Open Roof Surface under the Mid-Summer Sun.

stays below ambient temperature under maximum solar intensities of mid-summer. It is found to be 11 °C cooler than a commercial white cool roof nearby. A combination of specially chosen polymers and a silver thin film yields values near 100% for both solar reflectance, and thermal emittance at infrared wavelengths from 7.

Internal electric field densities of metal nanoshells.

The internal field patterns for gold shells filled with the same material as the surrounding medium are calculated with Mie theory and in the quasistatic approximation and their properties compared to the response of homogeneous spheres and metallic rings. One major difference between the sphere and shell case is that the areas of highest field enhancement in metallic shells are located perpendicular to the incident polarization, whereas for metallic spheres they are along the polarization direction. Recent results based on the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) are shown to be misleading, which might be due to the use of a too coarse grid size.

Evaluation of the limits of resonance tunability in metallic nanoshells with a spectral averaging method.

Spectral selectivity based on tuning the surface plasmon resonance in metallic nanoshells by variation of the relative shell thickness is shown to be limited by the interplay between scattering and absorption. To achieve resonance energies in the near infrared and infrared, relatively large cores are needed, which lead to strong and broad scattering bands and multipolar contributions in the visible. The scattering contribution to extinction is described with a new parameter Sdelta, which is defined for a wavelength range of interest A.

Color considerations in fluorescent solar concentrator stacks.

We present modeled results of the luminous and color outputs of a three-layer stack of fluorescent planar concentrators (FPCs). FPCs have the potential to provide sufficient luminous output to illuminate moderate-sized rooms for reasonably-sized collecting areas. It is of course necessary not only that the lumens be sufficient, but also that the light be sufficiently white as to be comfortable.