Synergizing Radiative Cooling and Solar Energy Harvesting

The sun and the cold universe are two key thermodynamic resources. While the sun has been long used as a renewable energy resource, only recently the cold universe is being exploited for radiative cooling as well as power generation. There are emerging opportunities of utilizing both the sun and the cold universe for enhanced solar energy harvesting, all-day power-generation, and simultaneous solar energy conversion and passive cooling. In this review, we provide an overview on recent efforts to synergize radiative cooling and solar energy harvesting. We discuss different strategies, their optical design, and the achieved performance. We finally provide remarks on challenges and an outlook on future directions in synergistically utilizing the cold universe and the sun.