hi-def polarised light sensor chip

 

Desert ant shows Chinese team the way to hi-def polarised light sensor chip

Chinese researchers have looked to the eyes of the desert ant to develop a compact chip to detect the orientation of polarised light.

The chip could have a wide range of uses including in navigation, fingerprint detection, and even identifying cancerous tissue, the team said. Polarisation photodetectors (pol-PDs) are special light sensors that can sense the direction of polarised light. By identifying differences in incoming light, these photodetectors can distinguish contrast and improve image quality.

Such photodetectors have widespread applications in areas including “geological remote sensing, machine vision [and] biological medicine”, the team wrote in a paper published in peer-reviewed journal Science Advances on December 4. But commercial polarised photodetectors are hard to miniaturise because the optical systems and parts are complex, according to the team.

Working alongside researchers from Beihang University and Imperial College London, a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences led by bio-inspired materials expert Li Mingzhu, turned to the eyes of desert ants to inspire a simpler design. While our eyes consist of a single eye unit, compound eyes found in insects and crustaceans are made up of many small units containing photoreceptor cells.

Desert ants can have hundreds of these units, allowing them to find their way across barren deserts without landmarks and return to their nest just by perceiving polarised sunlight, according to the researchers. Inspired by this unique polarisation vision, the team developed a new nanoimprinting crystallisation method that they used to create thin, crystalline films, which they then built into a chip without the need for additional bulky polarisation optical parts

Our pol-PD has a high detectivity, two orders of magnitude greater than that of commercial photodetectors, and exhibits high polarisation sensitivity,” the team wrote. They said their compact optoelectronic device demonstrated “excellent performance in a wide range of applications including accurate bionic navigation, sharp image restoration in hazy scenes, stress visualisation of polymers, and detection of cancerous areas in tissues without histological staining”.

The team found that while their photodetector could see a fingerprint impression in sharp detail, a camera capturing the same image did not show the fingerprint. Li and her team developed a one-step method to create highly crystalline perovskite thin films with a grating array – or a pattern of grooves – which they then integrated into a chip.

The bio-inspired polarisation photodetectors were able to achieve “highly sensitive single-shot polarisation imaging”, meaning they could capture images in a single exposure, the team said in their paper. “Our pol-PD provides a simple cost-effective polarisation imaging system with high sensitivity and enables the widespread adoption of polarisation imaging.”


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