https://spectrum.ieee.org/single-photon-camera
"Superconductor-based cameras that can detect a single photon—the smallest
smidgeon of light—have existed for 20 years, but they’ve remained confined to
laboratories due to the inability to scale them past a few pixels. Now, a team
at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo.,
has created a 0.4-megapixel single-photon camera—400 times as large as the
previous biggest camera of its type. They reported their results in a preprint
they submitted to arXiv on 15 June.
Single-photon cameras, made of superconducting nanowires, measure light with
unrivaled sensitivity and speed, and across an unmatched frequency range. With
the leap in size, the single-photon camera is poised to transition from a lab
curiosity to an industrial technology. Such cameras could find a home imaging
the cosmos on the next James Webb–type telescope, measuring light in photonic
quantum computers and communications, and peering into the brain with
noninvasive light-based techniques.
“From a scientific perspective, this is definitely opening a new avenue in
optical brain imaging,” says Stefan Carp, an associate professor of radiology
at the Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the work. “Other
approaches for optically mapping cortical brain flow may have lower costs, but
they all have shortcomings impacting signal quality that often require complex
signal processing. There is no compromise with nanowires from a performance
perspective.”
Superconducting nanowire detectors can capture almost every photon, work at
visible, ultraviolet, and infrared frequencies, and spit out results in mere
picoseconds for high frame-rate detection. The detectors’ sensitivity stems
from the fact that a high enough electrical current running through a
superconductor will destroy its superconducting properties. Each pixel of the
camera is a superconducting wire with a current set just below the threshold,
so that a single photon colliding with the wire will break its
superconductivity. The break results in increased resistance across the wire,
which can be detected almost immediately."
Via
Future Crunch:
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https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-wash-poverty-usa-seabird-conservation/>
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*** Xanni ***
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mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
