April Gocha’s opening line in the July 1st edition of CeramicsToday quickly captured my eye: “Today’s technology is really good at making you need the thing that you never even knew existed.” While it is difficult to predict what technology is next and the specific rare metals needed to make them happen, we will ultimately become dependent on both.
Scientists at Corning Inc. and Montreal, Canada’s Polytechnique are keeping the trend alive with the debut of a new technology that will undoubtedly put see-through sensors right into the glass of your soon-to-be-smarter smartphone. Their work was recently published in Optics Express.
Sourced from Parity News
Using femtosecond lasers, scientists have created photonic waveguides (channels for light to travel within) in Corning’s Gorilla Glass, creating a photonic system that can replace more traditional and more constraining electronic systems. A femtosecond laser is a laser which emits optical pulses with a duration in the domain of femtoseconds (1 fs = 10−15 s). Various diode-pumped lasers, based on neodymium-doped or ytterbium-doped gain media, operate in this range. The laser-etched guides are 10 times better at minimizing light loss from imperfections in the glass than previous attempts. Using a laser apparently also makes the manufacturing process simple, quick, cheap and flexible.
The team has also demonstrated that they can create a waveguide sensor that can take your temperature or that of anything it touches. They have apparently also created a waveguide-based authentication process that will create an entirely unique identity for your most treasured device. The researchers also developed a new method for authenticating a smartphone based on waveguides with holes at various locations. The light that escapes through those holes creates a pattern that is unique to their arrangement. The idea is that each phone would have its own unique pattern, like a fingerprint, which could then be read by an infrared detector to confirm the identity of the phone as an additional layer of security for making financial transactions using smartphones.
According to the researcher team, “Using lasers enables researchers to make waveguides at any depth, allowing them to create many applications, one on top of each other, like layers in a cake. Layering the waveguides within the glass itself paves the way for more compact devices, which means you could squeeze more apps into your phone.”
Sourced from TechLine Info
Beyond smarter smartphones, the tech could eventually lead to the integration of computing devices and sensors into other glass surfaces, like tables and windows.
As an aside, Corning continues to look for ways to improve Gorilla Glass and achieve new levels of tough. Gorilla Glass is the registered trademark for an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet toughened glass… engineered for a combination of thinness, lightness and damage-resistance. It is used primarily as the cover glass for portable electronic devices including mobile phones, portable media players, laptop computer displays and some television screens. It is manufactured through immersion in a molten alkaline salt bath using ion exchange to produce compressive residual stress at the surface. This prevents cracks from propagating – for a crack to start, it will first have to overcome this compressive stress. Gorilla Glass 3 is not only chemically strengthened — its atomic configuration is formulated so that the glass is more durable, and fundamentally tougher and more damage resistant even before chemical strengthening. Gorilla Glass 3 is up to three times more damage resistant than Gorilla Glass 2, being better able to resist the deep scratches that weaken glass. It is also more flexible. Gorilla Glass 3 is claimed to be 40% more scratch-resistant.
The chemical strengthening process is based on ion exchange, where large ions are “stuffed” into the glass surface, creating a state of compression The glass is placed in a hot bath of molten salt at a temperature of approximately 400 degrees C. Smaller sodium ions leave the glass, and larger potassium ions from the salt bath replace them. These large ions take up more room and are pressed together when the glass cools, producing a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass. Gorilla Glass’ composition enables the potassium ions to diffuse far into the surface, creating high compressive stress deep into the glass. This layer of compression creates the surface that is more resistant to damage.
Corning has indicated that other future improvements include making it less reflective and less susceptible to fingerprint smudges.
So again, Rare Metals Matter in enabling technologies which we aren’t even aware of… but “won’t be able to live without!”
Until soon… Ian
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