"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."

Comments

Re:Current PV cells are already up to 40% efficien

[Anonymous Coward]

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.