Radiative cooling technologies: a platform for passive heat dissipation

Cooling is essential to our daily lives both in residential and industrial settings, providing thermal comfort and ensuring reliable device performance. Owing to the rapid growth of cooling-related energy demand, passive cooling technologies, which are opposed to forced convection flow with air and water, have garnered immense attention. Intensive studies on radiative cooling have been conducted over the last decade to investigate the potential of its practical applications as a platform for a new generation of passive and scalable heat dissipation technologies. Here, we review progress toward understanding and optimizing the capability of radiative cooling and further discuss the remaining challenges and prospects. These findings can aid future studies in using the underlying principle of radiative cooling to solve generic light–matter interaction problems at multiscale wavelengths, thus providing fundamental insights into other thermal radiation applications, such as solar steamers, thermophotovoltaics, and infrared camouflage.