Researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of a camera so sensitive it can detect a single photon.
A photon is a tiny particle composed of electromagnetic waves. It is the basic unit that makes up light, but it has no mass and no charge. Microwaves, infrared light and X-rays are all made up of photons.
The technology to capture individual photons was developed at a Moscow University two decades ago. But technical obstacles prevented its widespread use beyond research labs.
A team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, has reported the successful implementation of a 400,000 pixel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) that they say will pave the way for the development of extremely light-sensitive large-format superconducting cameras. Their paper, "A superconducting-nanowire single-photon camera with 400,000 pixels," was published in the preprint repository arXiv on June 15.
Researchers from the University of Colorado's Department of Physics and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology also participated in the project.
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