New material may help us build Predator-style thermal vision specs

Military-grade infrared vision goggles use detectors made of mercury cadmium telluride, a semiconducting material that’s particularly sensitive to infrared radiation. Unfortunately, you need to keep detectors that use this material extremely cool—roughly at liquid nitrogen temperatures—for them to work. “Their cooling systems are very bulky and very heavy,” says Xinyuan Zhang, an MIT researcher and the lead author of a new study that looked for alternative IR-sensitive materials. Added weight was a sacrifice the manufacturers of high-end night-vision systems were mostly willing to make because cooling-free alternatives offered much worse...