New Sensor a Thousand Times More Sensitive Than Current Camera Sensors

Apparently this is a 1000x improvement over previous graphene sensors -- not ccds and such in general:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n5/full/ncomms2830.h...

"Graphene has attracted large interest in photonic applications owing to its promising optical properties, especially its ability to absorb light over a broad wavelength range, which has lead to several studies on pure monolayer graphene-based photodetectors. However, the maximum responsivity of these photodetectors is below 10 mA W−1, which significantly limits their potential for applications. Here we report high photoresponsivity (with high photoconductive gain) of 8.61 A W−1 in pure monolayer graphene photodetectors, about three orders of magnitude higher than those reported in the literature, by introducing electron trapping centres and by creating a bandgap in graphene through band structure engineering. In addition, broadband photoresponse with high photoresponsivity from the visible to the mid-infrared is experimentally demonstrated. To the best of our knowledge, this work demonstrates the broadest photoresponse with high photoresponsivity from pure monolayer graphene photodetectors, proving the potential of graphene as a promising material for efficient optoelectronic devices."

(My emphasis)

With thanks to these comments which helped point me in the right direction:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3809257&cid=438...

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fefup/graphene_...

I was also under the (apparently correct) assumptions that current digital sensors are close to the theoretical limits (because of the number of photons available for sampling).

Given that existing high-end CCD sensors already have sensitivity to individual photons, I very much doubt that this new graphene sensor can beat that technology by three orders of magnitude. I don't think the laws of physics will allow for three orders of magnitude more improvement in this area.

I wonder how this translates to ISO sensitivity at a given quality level.

Certainly a 1000x improvement seems unlikely, most of the noise is electrical, but even the 10x improvement you'd expect from lower voltages would be amazing.

I wonder how this will impact astronomy. I assume more energy efficient also means less need for cooling, possibly leading to cheaper low-noise sensors?

Does this mean I'll be able to get the same image, which I currently shoot at a shutter speed of 1 second, at 1/1000 of a second?

This is awesome. Why doesn't it surprise me at all? I can't see what they can use graphene for next.

Does anyone know if graphene photo-sensors carry residual charge (the reason CCDs and CMOSs capture noise)?

Interesting but the signal to noise ratio might be a more important metric? Maybe it's too early to say much about that?

Wow that was developed cheap ($200k)