It's widely known that the pixels inside a digital camera are nothing but a complex light sensor, which is able to decode the wavelengths of visible light that hits them, and to convert them into electrical signals, in a process roughly similar to what happens inside the human eye. However, since the digital camera age started developing, the technology has come so far that more improvements are very difficult to make without sacrificing the quality of the pictures or the reduced sizes of these devices.

Now, a new breakthrough in light sensor technology, made at the University of Toronto, in Canada, has the potential to benefit a wide array of applications, including end-user digital cameras. The new phenomenon makes use of a process known as multi-exciton generation (MEG), and the team that created it says that it's the first device in the world that collects an electrical current from an MEG-powered sensor.

“Digital cameras are now universal, but they suffer from a major limitation: they take poor pictures under dim light. One reason for this is that the image sensor chips inside cameras collect, at most, one electron's worth of current for every photon (particle of light) that strikes the pixel. Instead generating multiple excitons per photon could ultimately lead to better low-light pictures,” University of Toronto Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Ted Sargent explains. He is one of the main researchers involved in devising the new sensor.

“Multi-exciton generation breaks the conventional rules that bind traditional semiconductor devices. This finding shows that it's more than a fascinating concept: the tangible benefits of multiple excitons can be seen in a light sensor's measured current,” he adds. The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Innovation Trust all funded the new research, which has the potential to revolutionize many electronics markets in the world.