A team of researchers has built an intelligent sensor—the size of about 1/1000 of the cross-section of a human hair—that can simultaneously detect the intensity, polarization and wavelength of light, tapping into the quantum properties of electrons. It’s a breakthrough that could help advance the fields of astronomy, health care, and remote sensing.
With this device, the researchers were able to detect a strong presence of what is known as Bulk PhotoVoltaic Effect (BPVE), a process that converts light into electricity, giving a response strongly dependent on the light intensity, polarization and wavelength. The researchers found that the BPVE in TDBG can further be tuned by external electrical means, which allowed them to create “2D fingerprints” of the photovoltages for each different incident light.
Its small size makes it potentially valuable for applications such as deep space exploration, in-situ medical tests and remote sensing on autonomous vehicles or aircrafts. Moreover, their work reveals a new pathway for the investigation of nonlinear optics based on moiré materials. (Phys.org)
The results have been published in Nature.
