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.'"

Old News

[bmwm3nut]

This is fairly old news. We've been seeing the same stuff in our lab for about 8 years (also came across it during Quantum Dot research). It's been very hard to characterize. Cool stuff. Since you have x, y, and z resolution when you're "writing" to the photosensitive material, and these spots can be diffraction limited in size, you can imagine the storage density of read-only optical media for this.

A comic strip I read...

[Trillan]

I couldn't find it in the archive because the search tool is down, but Schlock Mercenary [schlockmercenary.com] by Howard Tayler once made the observation that great discoveries are less "Eureka!" and more "Hey, that's funny."

Re:A comic strip I read...

[geminidomino]

That was a reference to an Isaac Asimov quote.

*leaves work early to buy more Ovalkwik*