Dr. Mikhail A. Kats, Jack St. Clair Kilby Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

 This talk will describe advances in the measurement, understanding, and manipulation of thermal radiation and other heat-powered radiation. I’ll present new measurement techniques based on thermal radiation, including depth thermography, which yields temperature information below the surface of objects, Planck spectroscopy, a minimalistic spectroscopy technique that requires no gratings, interferometers, or other wavelength-selective components, and Planck-enhanced filter spectroscopy. Then I’ll describe our use of phase-transition materials to demonstrate negative- and zero-differential thermal emittance, and our recent demonstration of heat-powered infrared pulses down to picosecond scales, which includes components of thermal radiation and heat-powered radiation in nonequilibrium conditions. The out-of-equilibrium case will be discussed further, clarifying when heat-powered emission can exceed the Planck limit, and when it can’t. As an off-topic bonus, if there’s time, I’ll briefly discuss our exploration of the capabilities of ChatGPT to solve college-level electromagnetism problems.