As we all know, many insects, including butterflies, see the world differently than we do. Their visual systems are considerably different from our eyes, and have the ability to see wavelengths outside what our own eyes see. It is quite fascinating to examine the world including IR and UV, because it reveals what other beings are seeing. For example, many flowers display distinct patterns in colors we can’t see, which are certainly meaningful to bees and butterflies.
We can, of course, detect ultraviolet light with special sensors. But capturing UV images is expensive and slow. Nothing like the effortless real time capture of a butterfly’s eye.
This fall, researchers down the street at the University of Illinois report experiments with a new device that mimics the eye of a butterfly, yielding impress UV images [1].
The sensor is inspired by the visual system of Papilio xuthus, AKA Asian swallowtail butterflies, which has a dual mechanism for sensing UV light. One set of sensors are sensitive to blue and near blue UV light. The range is extended by cells with fluorescent pigments that absorb UV and radiate green light, which is detected by other sensors (i.e., the green receptors).
The UIUC device has a conventional photo sensitive array that responds to red, blue, and green across an array. They added a layer on top that glows green in response to UV. The ratio of the green light and the near UV picked up by the blue detectors gives a precise wavelength of the UV.
The result is an array that gives a 2D image in real time of frequency identified UV.
Among other uses, this technology is potentially useful in medical imaging, which they demonstrate in their study [2].
Very neat.
Nice work, all.
- Cheng Chen, Ziwen Wang, Jiajing Wu, Zhengtao Deng, Tao Zhang, Zhongmin Zhu, Yifei Jin, Benjamin Lew, Indrajit Srivastava, Zuodong Liang, Shuming Nie, and Viktor Gruev, Bioinspired, vertically stacked, and perovskite nanocrystal–enhanced CMOS imaging sensors for resolving UV spectral signatures. Science Advances, 9 (44):eadk3860, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adk3860
- Michael Nolan, Butterfly-Eyed Sensors Capture UV Images, in IEEE Spectrum – Biomedical, November 24, 2023. https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomemetics-butterfly-uv-sensor