Painted Sensor

UPI: Ted Sargent from the University of Toronto proposes painted sensors. Sargent and his colleagues cooked up semiconductor nanoparticles in a flask containing extra-pure oleic acid, the main ingredient in olive oil. Droplets of this solution were then placed on a glass slide and spread out into a smooth, continuous semiconductor film. After bathing the films for two hours in methanol solvent, the oil evaporated, leaving behind an 800-nanometer-thick layer of the light-sensitive nanoparticles.
At room temperature, the paint-on semiconductor films were roughly 10 times more sensitive to visual and infrared light than the sensors currently used in military night-vision and biomedical imaging. "These are exquisitely sensitive detectors of light," Sargent said. He and his colleagues report their findings in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature.
Sargent emphasized they have not developed images using their devices yet. "We've shown sensors with single pixel detection. Our next big challenge is scaling up to a full image sensor," he said.

Optics.org: "Our technology provides a lower cost alternative to achieving ultra-sensitive infrared photodetection for night-vision imaging," Ted Sargent, group leader at the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, told optics.org. "So far we have shown ultrasensitive photodetection across the visible and out to about 1.4 microns." In addition, the team claim that in principle the idea could be extended to 2 µm using the current materials system.