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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: 2) by Immerman on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:22PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:22PM (#438811)

    Fewer photons, but probably roughly the same power, which is likely the more important consideration (not knowing the exact physics powering the human eye). Still, you're right, while they might brighten a borderline starlit scene a bit (assuming they don't attenuate visible light) they're probably not going to do a whole lot for you if you can't see anything to begin with. On the other hand, if you give your eyes a chance to adjust you can actually see quite a bit by starlight, especially using your peripheral vision which has more low-light sensitive rods, o they could still be useful.

    There's also the possibility, depending on efficiency and the range of frequency response they can engineer, that you could "stack" 4 layers of crystals to achieve a 16x frequency shift of the "easily seen" frequency range from 390-700nm down to 6240-11200nm, which substantial overlaps the thermal imaging range of 8000nm-15000nm, in which range people will all glow like 100W lightbulbs. You could even add in an 5th layer with a very fine "checkerboard" of additional doubling so that you could add the 12480-22400nm range, fully spanning the thermal range at the expense of halving the apparent brightness and "double-mapping" the color spectrum so each color could correspond to two different temperatures.

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