1. Introduction
2. Conventional electromagnetic theory
2.1 Maxwell's equations and the dielectric function
2.2 Light propagation in the solid
2.3 Reflection and refraction of light at the interface
2.4 Optical absorption of the media 2.5 Thermal emittance of the surface
3. Optical properties of the solar materials
3.1 Photon-to-electron conversions
3.2 Free electron absorption based on the Drude model
3.3 Interband transitions 3.3 Effective medium approximation models
3.4 Optical constants of metals and dielectric media
3.5 The extraction of optical constants of refractive index and extinction coefficient
4. Optical characteristic of the solar absorbers
4.1 Spectrally-weighted broadband solar absorption
4.2 Thermal gain and lose of the infrared absorption and reflection 4.3 Optical evaluation of the solar absorbers
5. Intrinsic solar selective materials 6. Semiconductor-metal tandems
7. Metal-dielectric-based multilayers
8. Metal-dielectric-composited cermets
9. Nano-textured surface structures
10. Photonic-crystal-based metamaterials and designs
11. Experimental methods
11.1 Physical fabrication of the solar absorbers
11.2 Optical measurement of the solar absorption and reflection
11.3 Experimental measurement of the thermal emittance
12. Broad applications of the solar selective absorbers 12.1 Temperature-dependent efficiency
12.2 Effect of low and high solar concentrations
12.3 Thermal energy extraction apparatus
12.4 Concentrated solar power (CSP), solar thermophotovoltaics (STPV) and solar thermoelectric generators (STEGs)
12.5 System evaluation of the solar-to-thermal conversion efficiency
13. Summary
14. Acknowledgement
About the Author: Liang-Yao Chen received his PhD from Iowa State University. He is a Professor of Optical Science and Engineering at Fudan University in China.
