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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 08 2016, @09:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-don't-look-into-the-light dept.

Night vision goggles do a great job of countering the human eye's poor ability to see in the dark, but the devices are usually bulky, requiring several layers of lenses and plenty of power. But thanks to research from the Australian National University (ANU), a new type of nanocrystal could grant night vision powers to a standard pair of specs, without adding any weight.

Darkness, as we perceive it, is the absence of light on the visible spectrum that our eyes can detect, but there's still plenty of light at other frequencies that we can't use. Night vision goggles make use of the near-infrared spectrum, and convert the photons from that light into electrons that light up a phosphor screen inside the device to create the image. But all that makes for a chunky, power-hungry device.

The ANU team's nanocrystal can be used to create night vision devices that forgo electricity completely, by converting incoming photons from infrared light into other photons on the visible spectrum, to allow the human eye to see in the dark.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @01:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @01:34PM (#438714)

    Well, while speculating, it could also be that the first photon is simply absorbed (with no information but its energy remaining, minus the energy cost of the recoil, of course) and the second photon then gets the energy of the first added, without changing its direction (again, with an energy correction due to recoil). Assuming the photons are uncorrelated and sufficiently many, that would still give a pretty good sampling of the original photons, that is, a pretty good image.