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"Black Silicon" Advances Imaging, Solar Energy
waderoush writes "Forcing sulfur atoms into silicon using femtosecond laser pulses creates a material called 'black silicon' that is 100 to 500 times more sensitive to light than conventional silicon, in both the visible and infrared spectrums, according to SiOnyx, a venture-funded Massachusetts start-up that just emerged from stealth mode. Today's New York Times has a piece about the serendipitous discovery of black silicon inside the laboratory of Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. Meanwhile, a report in Xconomy explains how black silicon works and how SiOnyx and manufacturing partners hope to use it to build far more efficient photovoltaic cells and more sensitive detectors for medical imaging devices, surveillance satellites, and consumer digital cameras."
Not all photons have the same energy (wavelength), and this is for precision imaging not power generation. Note it's more "sensitive" not more efficient.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Read carefully: they said 500x more sensitive than silicon, not 500x more sensitive than PV cells.
It's a bit like if they said that by reacting hydrogen with oxygen, they created a compound 700 times denser than oxygen. That doesn't mean it's 700 times denser than the densest material known.
A pure silicon crystal ingot and a doped silicon wafer are entirely different. You want a pure crystal to grow the ingot as large as possible. To make silicon useful you take the wafer sliced form the ingot, ant it has to be doped (ie add impurities) amongst many other steps.
Some impurities are introduced while growing the crystal, but most are added after the fact.
It just depends on what you're using the silicon for.
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