Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today’s conventional chips — and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass.

The Toronto team cooked up semiconductor particles a few nanometers across in a flask containing extra-pure oleic acid, the main ingredient in olive oil. They then placed a drop of solution on a glass slide patterned with gold electrodes and forced the drop to spread out into a smooth, continuous semiconductor film using a process called spin-coating. They then gave their film a two-hour bath in methanol. Once the solvent evaporated, it left an 800 nanometer-thick layer of the light-sensitive nanoparticles.

At room temperature, the paint-on photodetectors were about ten times more sensitive to infrared rays than the sensors that are currently used in military night-vision and biomedical imaging.

“The ability to realize low-cost, paintable, high-performance designer semiconductors for use as short-wavelength infrared detectors and emitters is of enormous value for a wide range of communications, imaging and monitoring applications,” says MIT Professor John D. Joannopoulos.