Contact lenses with night vision could be on the way thanks to graphene breakthrough ~ News Welt

Friday, March 21, 2014

Contact lenses with night vision could be on the way thanks to graphene breakthrough

But what if night vision was something you could fit into a pair of contact lenses? You could keep a pair in your bag to slip in if you were going to be walking home alone in the dark, or even use them to take a night-time jaunt through a forest without spooking all the animals.

All this and more could be possible in the future thanks to a new development by researchers in the US using graphene lenses to sense “the full infrared spectrum” plus visible and ultraviolet light.

"We can make the entire design super-thin," said Zhaohui Zhong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan. "It can be stacked on a contact lens or integrated with a cell phone."

Current night vision technology needs bulky cooling equipment to stop the detectors getting confused by their own heat radiation, but the graphene-based models can do the same job using just a few layers of the atom-thick material.

The most effective night vision technology works by capturing the infrared portion of the light spectrum – this is the part that is emitted as heat by objects, instead of reflected as light.

Even the smallest and most modern night vision tech is pretty bulky.

Zhong suggests that the infrared-capturing graphene lenses could therefore be used for more than just night vision. The technology could help doctors monitor blood flow without having to move a patient or subject them to any scans, or be used by art historians to examine layers of paint underneath the surface. It’s not quite X-ray vision but it’s pretty damn close.

Previous attempts to use graphene in

Friday, March 21, 2014