Sensitive UV Detector Ignores Visible Light

techmaven writes: "Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new device that detects ultraviolet light and at the same time ignores visible light. The researchers said that the new detector could lead to a UV light detector approximately 10 times more sensitive than those now on the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing astronomers to observe important objects throughout the universe for the first time."

man that sucks....

[jeffy124]

they just missed their chance to put it on the hubble. the astronauts returned from there just a couple days ago.

Re:man that sucks....

[global_diffusion]

No problem, we'll just stick it on the NGST. What's that? Budget cuts? Oh. Well then, nevermind.

revolutionizing voyeurism

[vossman77]

Could one use this perhaps to peer through the curtains of our neighbors without the distraction of visible light background? It doesn't show its sensitivity curve.
[maxmax.com]
document on filtering visible light

Re:revolutionizing voyeurism

[wsloand]

Actually, this would not help at all in looking through the neighbor's curtains. You would want lower wavelengths (your link is for infrared-- the opposite direction of UV).

Check out this link [utk.edu] for some more information on the em spectrum.

Re:revolutionizing voyeurism

[vossman77]

Well, crap I had better return my b.s. in physics and give my students credit on their tests.

Thanks for catching me on that, it was 6:30 am after a LONG night. I was just trying to put a link with my posts like a good boy. It was hard locating voyeurism technology pages. I bet there could be some good things coming out of UV radiation.

vossman

That's cute!

[Derci]

Can it be used to "photo" normal things on earth? I wonder how flowers, buildings or humans would look like when viewed using this sensor.

Re:That's cute!

[Verne]

Buildings would look kinda freaky, cause windows block UV light, so they wouldn't be see-through.

As for everything else, go ask the predator ;)

Trek IV

[chaidawg]

Where do you keep your Wessels?

Radical improvement-

[purduephotog]

In the world of detectors an order of magnitude is about the only thing worth talking about.

Going from 5% efficiency to anything better than 10% would be an incredible leap. The filters they talk about are 'cutting' filters - you create them by depositing thin films of MgF or other salts on the surface of a piece of optical glass- multiple coats builds up a pass region while allowing destructive interferance to cancle out what you don't want.

The advantage is these can be turned sideways 45 degrees to 'reflect' the unwanted light to another detector (or in the case of IR, into a heat sink to dump it), but it also distorts the signal. Better to reflect it straight back.

This also has the advantage of going to fiber as well- encode a UV signal into a fiber optic (assuming your refraction index is high enough) and you can double or triple bandwidth.

It truly is a very important work - now if they can get it to work at 'space' temperatures and hard vaccuum ;P

Cancer cell detector?

[nucal]

From the article: "It turns out that if you're shining light on something, the light will scatter," said Ulmer. "With cells, the way it scatters depends on whether the cells are large, as in cancer cells, or smaller, as in normal cells."

I find this a little oversimplified - there are normal skin cells that are 10x larger than cancer cells. Besides, there are more specific high throughput methods for screening cells already in development, such as "gene chip" style arrays that can determine whethercancer related genes are turned on or not.

Nothing new here

[adminispheroid]

At least one thing about this story is full of crap. The article quotes the guy saying "Hubble's UV detectors are not solar-blind" -- this would be false. One of the detectors in the newly installed ACS is called the Solar Blind Channel (SBC). Can you guess why it's called that? In addition, two UV detectors in STIS, which was installed in 1997, are solar-blind.