COMMUNICATIONTo demonstrate effi cient radiative coolers, selective IR emitters have been extensively studied. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] In particular, composite materials, [ 2,9 ] white pigmented paints, [ 5,8 ] SiO fi lms, [ 6,7,10 ] and polymeric materials [ 3,11 ] are demonstrated to possess IR emission within the atmospheric transparency window. However, almost all of these materials either lack near-unity emission or broadband emission within the entire 8-13 μm window. [ 1,2,[5][6][7][8][9][10] In addition, signifi cant IR absorption outside the transparency window, where the atmosphere is highly emissive, also restricts the materials to cool down well below the ambient temperature. [2][3][4][5]11 ] On the other hand, artifi cial metallic nanostructures, such as, plasmonic nanostructures, [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and metallic photonic crystals [19][20][21][22] possess highly selective IR optical absorptions. However, in most cases, their absorption spectra are diffi cult to optimize for wide-band absorption. Metamaterials, on the contrary, can provide both selective and broadband IR absorption. [23][24][25][26][27] Recently, multilayer metal-dielectric anisotropic metamaterials have been demonstrated to possess intriguing optical properties. [ 25,[28][29][30] By employing dispersive properties and anisotropy, ultra-broadband, spectrally selective and polarization sensitive absorption was achieved in the visible to microwave frequencies. Here, for the fi rst time, we propose the use of anisotropic metamaterials toward the application of highly effi cient radiative cooling. To achieve an ideal thermal emitter, we design and demonstrate a microstructure consisted of an array of symmetrically shaped conical metamaterial (CMM) pillars leading to a near unity absorption of unpolarized light. By selectively matching the thermal emission (absorption) to the entire 8-13 μm atmospheric transparency window, the CMM structure can possess a practical radiative cooling power of 116.6 W m −2 .Our design concept of an elementary metal-dielectric CMM pillar consists of alternating layers of aluminum and germanium as depicted in Figure 1 a. Each of the metal and dielectric layers maintains the circular symmetry along the vertical axis and the diameters of the layers decrease gradually from bottom to top which gives the structure a conical shape. The thickness of the aluminum layer is 30 nm and the thickness of the germanium layer is 110 nm. The top and bottom diameters of the CMM pillars are defi ned t and b . The substrate of the CMM structure is set to 150 nm thick aluminum which is optically thick enough to diminish any IR transmission through the substrate. The dispersive permittivity of aluminum is defi ned from reference [ 31 ] and the permittivity of germanium is 16. The periodicity of the CMM pillars, p is set to 1.3 times b , providing a suffi cient gap between the adjacent CMM pillars to avoid any proximity effects. [ 29 ] The aspect ratio, s , of t and b is optimized to 0.6 and seven periods of metal...