New method for measuring luminescence lifetime offers breakthrough in scientific imaging

Ac­cel­er­at­ing the pace of dis­cov­ery in sci­ence and in­dustry

22-Oct-2024 - Re­search­ers at the Max Planck In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Mi­cro­bi­o­logy, Leib­niz-In­sti­tute for Baltic Sea Re­search and Uni­versity of Copen­ha­gen in­tro­duce an in­nov­at­ive ap­proach to im­age lu­min­es­cence life­times. This simple ap­proach uses read­ily-avail­able cost-ef­fect­ive ...

Understanding microplastics - with high-speed cameras

How microplastic particles spread in the ocean depends on microscopic details

07-Aug-2024 - Microplastics are a global problem: they end up in rivers and oceans, accumulate in living organisms and disrupt entire ecosystems. How tiny particles behave in a current is difficult to describe scientifically - especially in the case of thin fibers, which make up more than half of the ...

Breakthrough in separating plastic waste

Machines can distinguish 12 different types of plastic thereby separate plastics according to their chemical composition

07-Jan-2022 - In contrast to common perceptions, plastic is in no way near one material. Rather, it is a combination of many materials (polymers) with different chemical compounds and additives such as pigments or fibres, depending on its use. It is very difficult to tell the difference between different types ...

Seeing the world through different eyes

An entire IR camera on a chip

28-Oct-2021 - Short-wave infrared light (SWIR) is useful for many things: It helps sort out damaged fruit and inspecting silicon chips, and it enables night vision devices with sharp images. But SWIR cameras have so far been based on expensive electronics. Researchers at Empa, EPFL, ETH Zurich and the ...

Infrared Detector for Smartphones and Autonomous Vehicles

Switching between different wavelengths

19-Aug-2021 - Jülich researchers, together with Italian and German colleagues, have developed a particularly cost-effective infrared detector that can be easily integrated into existing camera chips and smartphones. The new sensor can make two technically important ranges of infrared radiation visible, which ...

Breakthrough could enable cheaper infrared cameras

12-Mar-2019 - There's an entire world our eyes miss, hidden in the ranges of light wavelengths that human eyes can't see. But infrared cameras can pick up the secret light emitted as plants photosynthesize, as cool stars burn and batteries get hot. They can see through smoke and fog and plastic. But infrared ...

Broadband achromatic metalens focuses light regardless of polarization

New design doubles the efficiency of the metalens

23-Jan-2019 - We live in a polarized world. No, we aren't talking about politics -- we're talking about light. Much of the light we see and use is partially polarized, meaning its electric field vibrates in specific directions. Lenses designed to work across a range of applications, from phone cameras to ...

One of the world's fastest cameras films motion of electrons

Research team examines ultrafast conversion of light energy in a solid

24-Dec-2018 - During the conversion of light into electricity, such as in solar cells, a large part of the input light energy is lost. This is due to the behaviour of electrons inside of materials. If light hits a material, it stimulates electrons energetically for a fraction of a second, before they pass the ...

Tiny light detectors work like gecko ears

02-Nov-2018 - Geckos and many other animals have heads that are too small to triangulate the location of noises the way we do, with widely spaced ears. Instead, they have a tiny tunnel through their heads that measures the way incoming sound waves bounce around to figure out which direction they came ...

Fastest 3D tomographic images at BESSY II

10-Aug-2018 - An HZB team has developed an ingenious precision rotary table at the EDDI beamline at BESSY II and combined it with particularly fast optics. This enabled them to document the formation of pores in grains of metal during foaming processes at 25 tomographic images per second - a world record. The ...