New Photodetector Gathers Light Beyond Visible Spectrum

Researchers at Rice Univ. and Sandia National Laboratories have made a nanotube-based photodetector that gathers light in and beyond visible wavelengths. It promises to make possible a unique set of optoelectronic devices, solar cells and perhaps even specialized cameras.Solar Laptop chargerA traditional camera is a light detector that captures a record, in chemicals,Of course, even people who seldom cook would benefit from knowing the different types of knife sets blades and their respective functions. of what it sees. Modern digital cameras replaced film with semiconductor-based detectors.But the Rice detector, the focus of a paper that appeared in the online Nature journal Scientific Reports, is based on extra-long carbon nanotubes. At 300 micrometers, the nanotubes are still only about 100th of an inch long, but each tube is thousands of times longer than it is wide. That boots the broadband detector into what Rice physicist Junichiro Kono considers a macroscopic device, easily attached to electrodes for testing. The nanotubes are grown as a very thin "carpet" by the lab of Rice chemist Robert Hauge and pressed horizontally to turn them into a thin sheet of hundreds of thousands of well-aligned tubes.If the market has request for the Crushing equipment shape, and the users want to reduce the quick wear parts cost. Here we recommend firstly use primary jaw limestone crusher.They're all the same length, Kono says,Jaw crushers have many advantages, such as big reduction ratio, even granularity, Hydraulic cone crusher, reliable working condition, convenient repair and economic operation. but the nanotubes have different widths and are a mix of conductors and semiconductors, each of which is sensitive to different wavelengths of light. "Earlier devices were either a single nanotube, which are sensitive to only limited wavelengths," he says. "Or they were random networks of nanotubes that worked, but it was very difficult to understand why." "Our device combines the two techniques," says Sébastien Nanot, a former postdoctoral researcher in Kono's group and first author of the paper. "It's simple in the sense that each nanotube is connected to both electrodes, like in the single-nanotube experiments. But we have many nanotubes, which gives us the quality of a macroscopic device."With so many nanotubes of so many types, the array can detect light from the infrared (IR) to the ultraviolet,Solar light and all the visible wavelengths in between. That it can absorb light across the spectrum should make the detector of great interest for solar energy, and its IR capabilities may make it suitable for military imaging applications, Kono says. "In the visible range, there are many good detectors already," he says. "But in the IR, only low-temperature detectors exist and they are not convenient for military purposes. Our detector works at room temperature and doesn't need to operate in a special vacuum."