Accident Could Lead To Better Digital Cameras

Dave Bullock (eecue) writes "Scientists at UCLA have accidentally created a material that will some day give us better, faster, cheaper, more flexible digital cameras. I toured their lab and shot a photo essay for Wired. Personally I'm looking forward to a quantum-dot embedded camera sensor someday soon. 'Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed. "The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.'"

Comments

Whoa There Chen

[mpapet]

I'm sorry to break the news, but just because you created something photo-conductive, even super-off-the-charts-photo-conductive doesn't mean it will become a digital camera sensor.

My question is, how is it that a UCLA grad student got a whole article out of bad research?

Even worse, the department will smile upon his non-work work because of the press generated more than anything else.