Weak light
can now be used for applications as well
Date: July 16, 2012
Chemists
and materials scientists from the University of Groningen and the FOM
Foundation have found a way of ‘harvesting‘ infrared light more efficiently.
For this they use special molecules, which act as light antennae to capture the
energy from weak infrared light. The antennae transmit the energy to the
nanoparticles they are attached to. These particles subsequently convert two
weak captured photons into a single strong, energy-rich photon, a process
termed upconversion. The new antennae molecules amplify this process 3300
times, which represents a considerable improvement for solar cells or medical
imaging techniques, for example. The research was published on 15 July 2012 on
the website of the journal Nature Photonics.
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