Weekly news picks - 21 Feb 2009

Last week's news stories from the world of optics included cheaper solar technology and imaging both the very small and the very far away.

Vision of Space-Based Solar Power [Courtesy NASA.gov]

A US Department of Energy study shows the cost of photo-voltaic solar power systems has come down significantly in the past decade, and yet according to a study by the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, those costs could be cheaper still. By using a more diverse range of semiconductor materials, such as the 12 candidates they propose, rather than focusing efforts on conventional semiconductors like silicon, the solar industry would benefit from a plentiful supply of raw materials. Any performance loss associated with these materials, such as lower conversion efficiency from light to electricity, would be offset by their abundance and reduced cost.

The state government of Victoria in Australia are supporting research and development efforts aimed at bring down the cost of solar produced energy, backing trials by a banknote printing company to produce organic solar cells using their expertise in polymer printing technology. Flexible solar panels made from cheap polymer materials that can be rolled off a printing press with a high throughput, could help bring solar power into mainstream commercial and domestic use.

Taking solar power generation into space is a concept being proposed by Space Energy Inc. This article published by Universe Today describes their vision to put solar arrays into Earth orbit that will convert sunlight into microwave energy, which is then beamed to Earth where it is collected by a receiver and converted into electrical energy.

Looking into space just got better thanks to a "virtual telescope" operated by French astronomers. Combining the information gathered from multiple telescopes using near infra-red interferometry, they were able to discern the sphere of molecular gas surround a star located 500 light years away.

Improvements in astronomical telescopes may also come from work by US scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, who have made nanoscale light detectors that can be used to sense very weak light and even colour. Carbon nanotubes were coupled to light sensitive molecules which absorbed photons and produced a detectable change in the conductance of the nanotube.

From imaging the far far away, we now come to a story about scientists at The Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, who have been looking close up at the very very small. Using lasers and an optical frequency comb technique, they were able to measure the size of a single neutron halo around beryllium-11. These exotic nuclei are short-lived and not fully understood, but with these precise spectroscopic measurements, which showed the neutron halo just 7 femtometres (that's 7 thousands of a billionth of a metre) from the nucleus, scientists will be able to achieve a better understanding of the forces that bind these weakly held nuclear material to the nucleus.

Check out the news page at OpticalFutures.com for more stories on what's new in optical science and technology.