Glasses equipped with night-vision capabilities could be made a reality thanks to new ultra-thin ‘skins’ of electronic material developed by MIT engineers.
As a demonstration, the team fabricated a 10nm-thin membrane of pyroelectric material that produces an electric current in response to changes in temperature. The film was shown to be highly sensitive to heat and radiation across the far-infrared spectrum and could enable lighter, more portable and highly accurate sensing devices.
Night-vision goggles and scopes are at present heavy and bulky because far-infrared sensors require large cooling elements. They are based on photodetector materials, in which a change in temperature induces the material’s electrons to jump in energy and briefly cross an energy ‘band gap’, before settling back into their ground state. This electron jump serves as an electrical signal of the temperature change.
However, this signal can be affected by noise in the environment and, to prevent such effects, photodetectors...