"Black Silicon" Advances Imaging, Solar Energy 114
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."
Current PV cells are already up to 40% efficient (Score:1, Interesting)
So how exactly are they going to become 500X better at gathering light?
So what's the catch? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is another company using the mystique of "Trade secrets" to attract capital. If this is as good as they say, they wouldn't have any secrets and would spill the beans.
I think they have found some weaknesses that restrict the usefulness of this technology. Perhaps sensors made with this technology must be supercooled in order for them to function properly (i.e. perhaps this technology amplifies thermal noise by dozens of times).
Bad science writers annoy me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Science writers who don't know what they are talking about annoy me,
There's an interesting irony to SiOnyx's business: a large chunk of the semiconductor industry's effort over the past 50 years has gone toward making silicon as pure as possible. But now SiOnyx and other companies are showing how useful--and perhaps profitable--it can be to craft silicon devices with impurities, defects, and unconventional structures.
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.
LetterRip
Who does that? (Score:2, Interesting)
Forcing sulfur atoms into silicon using femtosecond laser pulses...
Who sits around and dreams up a process like that? "Hey, I wonder what would happen hitting sulphur ions with a femtosecond laser pulse?" Just bizarre what some people sit around thinking about all day.
Breakthroughs are everyday... (Score:5, Interesting)
But there have been so many stories of "break through" improvements that I don't really care until a profoundly more efficient product is made.
Some years back, I read an article in an old magazine (I think it was a 1960's Popular Science) about a new method of blowing glass resulting in "near unbreakable" bottles. It went on excitedly for page, after page, talking about the new era of safety that this kind of glass could behest - glass that doesn't easily break - you could drop your soda or medicine bottle and it wouldn't shatter!
Intrigued, I spent an entire afternoon at the local University library trying to figure out exactly what happened to this miraculous technology! I even did some searching (AltaVista) on the then new-fangled Internet. The truth rather surprised me...
This "breakthrough" technology that had gone invisible was part of my everyday life, including the bottle of Diet Coke I was then slurping from! It had become so common that virtually nobody produced the old-fashioned fragile bottles and glass anymore!
That's why it works to have coffee tables with glass counter tops. That's why restaurants can get away with the sterile, easily cleaned, hard-to-scratch glass overlays on their tables. Next time you are at a corner market and see the glass countertop with the items for sale inside, think about that article in the ancient Popular Science article.
Once breakthroughs actually become available, they don't seem like breakthroughs - they quickly just become part of the landscape, and people don't notice them, anymore. This is why the "Intelligent Design" idiots can get out of their incredibly complex, affordable, high-tech SUVs and then announce that Science has it all wrong. Once it's routine, it no longer seems like such a big deal.
Proof? Affordable, thin-film photovoltaics is still largely considered a "breakthrough" technology. But there's a company doing it now, today, affordably [nanosolar.com]. Alas, while they are growing as fast as they are able, all their production capacity is already sold to germany. I'd suggest you read up on it [wikipedia.org].
High tech is introduced slowly. At first, the high engineering cost can only be paid in niche markets where the return on investment is fat. But as the original engineering cost gets paid back, and as the technology itself is matured and tested, the cost of implementation drops rapidly, so that it applies to more and more and more niches. By the time it's available for common Joes like you and me, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, and we are left wondering "where are the breakthroughs?" from our satellite/GPS navigated, MP3 playing, fuel-injected, ABS-brakes protecting, vulcanized rubber-tired, air-conditioned, hybrid gas/electric, high-tech wonder machine.
Where are the breakthroughs? Look at the beer bottle in your trashcan.
Perhaps there isn't one (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is as good as they say, they wouldn't have any secrets and would spill the beans.
The fundamental research [harvard.edu] was done a long [latimes.com] time [physorg.com] ago [photonics.com](with picture of prototypes); I've read articles about it in Electronics and Wireless World several times over the years, so it's hardly a secret. Any potentially patentable critical element is going to be kept under wraps, obviously.
I think they have found some weaknesses that restrict the usefulness of this technology.
Or they spent 3 years on R&D fixing those weaknesses, like the article says.
Further information of note from the NYT article:
So we're told:
1- There's a decade of peer-reviewed research behind the technology.
2- They have funding and partners already.
3- They're shipping parts now, not at some unknown time in the future.
Either this is real, or Dr Mazur et al are engaging in an exceptionally elaborate, very public and career-ending series of lies (and it's not as though SiOnyx will be a paying proposition if the tech doesn't work). The part of the operation that does look suspect is their web site [sionyxinc.com] (Flash warning), but that doesn't prove anything about the physics involved.
Re:Gentlemen... (Score:3, Interesting)
3. Sulfur Hexaflouride is apparently safe enough to inhale... well, as safe as helium, anyway. It will make your voice very deep, owing to its high density. There are countless Youtube videos that demonstrate all of the hijinx possible with this heavier-than-air gas.
However, since it displaces oxygen, you would eventually die from asphyxiation if you breathed it exclusively for several minutes.