A Harvard physicist has produced a new material, called black silicon, that could radically impact the photography industry, the New York Times reports today.

Dr. Eric Mazur discovered black silicon when he instructed one of his graduate students to shine an exceptionally powerful laser light — briefly matching the energy produced by the sun falling on the surface of the entire earth — on a silicon wafer. On a hunch, the researcher also applied sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits.

'The silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when Dr. Mazur and his researchers examined the material with an electron microscope, they discovered that the surface was covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes,' NYT writes. 'Black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light. It is now on the verge of commercialization, most likely first in night vision systems'.

“We have seen a 100 to 500 times increase in sensitivity to light compared to conventional silicon detectors,” said James Carey, a co-founder of SiOnyx who worked on the original experiments as a Harvard graduate student.

Can you imagine a camera's sensor 500 times more sensible to light than actual models. Will Nikon, Canon and the like take on the idea? Especially, since black silicon can be cheaply produced using current semiconductor manufacturing plants.

Read the entire article on the New York Times' website.