alt Hacker NewsFirst 'perovskite camera' can see inside the human body
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I see several comments here that misunderstand "perovskites", so to be clear: "perovskite" can refer to either the mineral or the crystal structures with the same structure as the mineral. Virtually everything written about "perovskites" refers to perovskite structures; the actual mineral perovskite is just used as a rock (geologists poke at it and miners crush it up.)
Perovskite structures are interesting because they have unique material properties. The range of properties is quite broad: ferroelectric, pyroelectric, and piezoelectric properties, photoelasticity, very high permittivity, et cetera. In popular science news, you will mostly read about potential uses in solar cells, but they are already commonly used in our world: barium titanate is used as a dielectric in capacitors, lead zirconium titanate is used as the piezoelectric crystal in many resonators, lithium niobate is used for optical waveguides and for optical antialiasing filters because of its birefringence.
Perovskites are research materials being researched.
Images produced from SPECT cameras have been around for a while. [2]
This is potentially a 16 pixel "camera" which the "image" is a gaussian blob (Figure 1e and 5e) [1].
This is interesting for a variety of reasons but is way overblown in the "camera" or "image" context. It's demonstration that one can make pixelated devices (4x4) of a specific kind of promising material.
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63400-7
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-photon_emission_compute...
Hmm, why do I know this word "perovskite". Wikipedia gives me no clues, just some mineral.
Where are the pictures?
"While cheaper than CZT detectors, NaI detectors are bulky and produce blurrier images — like taking a photo through a foggy window."
I'm constantly amazed at what these articles do not show. Like if we have an example of a foggy window image and one from CZT and now one from this new sensor, why not show an example of each? A picture is worth a 1,000 words after all, so not including them really does the reader a disservice when reading these articles.