A Glimmer of Light From Silicon

Getting silicon to emit light is no easy feat, but it remains the dream of many photonics engineers, who almost reflexively refer to it as "the holy grail." Now a team of materials scientists at the University of Pennsylvania say they might have managed it. "This is the first demonstration of bulk silicon emitting light in the visible range," says Ritesh Agarwal, head of the Nanoscale Phase-Change and Photonics group at UPenn