This release is available in French.
Montreal, April 28, 2010 – Olivier Daigle, recipient of the People's Choice Award for discovery of the year given by Québec Science magazine, has launched a new company with his partner, Marie-Eve Ducharme. Nüvü Camēras will commercialize their EMCCD camera, which is considered to be the most sensitive in the world.
Olivier Daigle designed the camera as part of his PhD studies in astrophysics at the Université de Montréal Department of Physics. The camera was conceived under the direction of Claude Carignan and Photon etc inc., a research and development company that specializes in photonic measurement and analysis instruments. Nüvü Camēras' launch comes after four years of research and development in uncharted territory. Thanks to substantial noise reduction, the camera can quadruple the effectiveness of current telescopes in applications requiring either short exposure or low levels of light.
NASA purchases copy of camera's controller
The camera was initially designed as part of the international 3D-NTT instrument project. Its installation is planned for early 2011 in Chili at the New Technology Telescope, which belongs to the European Southern Observatory. In May 2009, NASA purchased a copy of the camera's controller (i.e. its brain). Shortly after, the University of São Paulo bought two copies of the controller for an astronomical instrument to be set up at the Chili's Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope in July 2010.
Nüvü Camēras' will prioritize domains that abandoned EMCCD technology because of poor performance of cameras currently on the market. The exceptional performance of the Nüvü EMCCD technology now makes it possible to undertake high-contrast spectroscopy and extremely low-flux imagery. Other promising examples of Nüvü fields of application: biomedical diagnosis (age-related macular degeneration, cancer), terrestrial, aerial and spatial remote sensing, as well as nuclear medicine gamma imagery.
On the Web :
Université de Montréal :
www.umontreal.ca/english
Université de Montréal Department of Physics:
www.phys.umontreal.ca
Québec Science magazine prize:
http://tinyurl.com/32vsqzk
Nüvü Camēras inc. :
www.nuvucameras.com
Photon Etc inc.:
www.photonetc.com