Fog lies over the bay. As is so often the case in San Francisco, dense wafts envelop the city’s landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. SWIR, short-wave infrared, makes it possible to penetrate them. Cameras with SWIR photochips can see through fog, rain and haze. They usually deliver razor-sharp images in grey scale. Such cameras are ideal for autonomous cars or in aviation, for example, where a clear view is indispensable.

Image above: Dr. Dan Buca (right) with his two colleagues Dr. Omar Conception Diaz (left) and Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Tiedemann from Jülich’s Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-9)

However, very high manufacturing costs often prevent their use in everyday life. An inexpensive alternative, developed by Dr. Dan Buca’s group at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-9) together with colleagues from the Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics in Frankfurt (Oder) and the University of Milan, could change this. At the heart of it is a germanium-tin semiconductor from Jülich. Its elements are well compatible with silicon, the standard material for chips. As a result, the new detector can be manufactured using established technology and can be integrated on existing chips. Very low-priced camera chips could be constructed for use in today’s smartphones and cameras.

The detector can also be switched between two ranges of infrared radiation, the near infrared (NIR) and the “short-wave” infrared (SWIR). This helps, for example, to precisely distinguish liquids that look colourless to the human eye but absorb NIR and SWIR radiation to different degrees. The partners now want to further develop their research detector to better demonstrate its potential applications.

Christian Hohlfeld