Cold shield

A cold shield is a device to protect an object from unwanted heating by thermal radiation or light.

It can be found in molecular beam epitaxy chambers to protect the growth areas from thermal radiation from hot sources.

An infrared detector is protected from thermal background radiation outside its optical field of view.

Most cold shield applications require near instantaneous cooling, making low mass of the structure very important.

Therefore, electroforming is the preferred method of fabricating cold shields.