10/15/08
THz nanosensor to see the first light from the Early Universe: News & views articles are highlighting Prof. Sergeev’s paper in Nature Nanotechnology
A novel nanosensor, developed by the Rutgers-JPL-UB team, offers unprecedented sensitivity in the THz range, which contains 98% of the light emitted since the Big Bang. The paper “Ultrasensitive hot-electron nanobolometers for terahertz astrophysics,” recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, 3, 496 (2008) has demonstrated that manageable electron-phonon kinetics together with ultrasmall electron heat capacity in nanostructures provide wide possibilities for significant improvement of detectors, quantum counters and calorimeters.
The developed technology will help astronomers to observe very distant galaxies as they were in the Early Universe. As a magic time-machine, the detector will allow them to see the first light in the Universe, which was generated in the processes of star and galaxy formation almost 14 billion years ago. Besides astrophysics, these nanodevices are promising for quantum information technologies and quantum metrology.
News & views articles are highlighting this research:
www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n8/full/nnano.2008.221.html
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080710155246.htm
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1783
http://www.nano.org.uk/news/july2008/latest1488.htm
