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Graphene-Based Image Sensor To Enhance Low-Light Photography

Posted by timothy on from the bright-light-of-the-moon dept.

cylonlover writes "A team of scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has developed a new image sensor from graphene that promises to improve the quality of images captured in low light conditions. In tests, it has proved to be 1,000 times more sensitive to light than existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or charge-coupled device (CCD) camera sensors in addition to operating at much lower voltages, consequently using 10 times less energy."

4 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. New type of "bio" imaging ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There was this article on slashdot 4 years ago, http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/23/1819215/people-emit-visible-light.

    Summary:

    "The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Japanese researchers have shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."

    So humans emit light that is 1,000 times too weak to detect, but this new sensor is 1,000 more sensitive to light, what a coincident! I imagine this would have great applications in the health industry eg. passive health assessment. Or another use might be a better lie detector :)

    1. Re:New type of "bio" imaging ? by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Informative

      ^^^ This. The Nature Communications article is very clear, right from the abstract, that this sensor is 1000x more sensitive than previous *graphene* sensors. *Nowhere* in the journal article is the performance compared directly against CCD/CMOS sensors, but it's trivial to tell (from the numbers given) that this sensor isn't remotely "competitive" in the visible light region. Fortunately, that's not the interesting use of the sensor --- the journal article does compare and cite advantages against other infrared sensing technologies. The researchers might have meant to say that these graphene sensors could be useful for cheap, low-power (but not high sensitivity) visible light applications --- not what the journalists have twisted this into.

  2. The three orders of magnitude... by Mr.+Chow · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to the paper, "Through this scheme, we have demonstrated a high photoresponsivity of 8.61A/W, which are about three orders of magnitude higher than those in previous reports from pure monolayer graphene photodetectors.". So it is 1000x better than previous iterations of a particular variety of detector, not the detectors we actually use.

  3. Re:1000 times better? by asvravi · · Score: 5, Informative

    First off, if we cut through the usual dismal quality of scientific reporting, what they made is a photodetector, not an image sensor. It detects single events rather than capture an image. The sensitivity of the detector is not the same as quantum efficiency. The sensitivity they mention here includes a "photogain" by virtue of the detector operating more or less as a light-controlled amplifier. It takes electrical input energy and simply amplifies it based on incident light. That can create a flow of many more electrons than incident photons. The same thing can possibly be also done by introducing a gain in the conventional image sensor electronics too, but having this photogain right inside the sensor should theoretically lead to better noise performance. So we would expect the paper to quantify the noise characteristics, but it is woefully sparse on the noise details - which leads me to suspect this is yet another "invention" that is never going to see the light of day.