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Gallium nitride >1
Robert Firmhofer Director of the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, recommends three exciting new projects by Polish scientists
The first noteworthy project is a new technology developed by the company Ammono. This small company, which has yet to make a name for itself, has developed a new method for synthesising the best, biggest and purest crystals of gallium nitride. This discovery has put Ammono on the cutting edge of innovation in the 21st century. PhD students at the Warsaw Polytechnic and Warsaw university founded the company 10 years ago. Much like silicon, gallium nitride is a semiconductor, although it has many additional physical properties, such as the capacity to emit light. Gallium nitride crystals are already used to produce Blu-ray lasers and in the future they will most likely revolutionise the market for laser projectors. The new technology makes it possible to miniaturize equipment while maintaining high resolution and colour quality. Thanks to the methods developed in Poland, computers should soon be shrunk down to unthinkably small dimensions and miniature devices will be able to project high - quality images on-demand wherever we want, for example on any wall. Gallium nitride is also used to produce light-emitting diodes and in electrical switching devices. New gallium-nitride based semiconductors will increase the capacity of electrical circuitry to handle higher voltages and frequencies, resulting in greater energy efficiency for many types of equipment, including electrical and hybrid automobiles. One of the biggest problems for electrical cars is their limited range. More efficient gallium nitride crystals will make it possible to extend considerably battery capacity without an increase in size. The team of young scientists at Am-
mono are continuing the best Polish traditions in semi-conductor research, harking back to Jan Czochralski, the inventor of the method for synthesising single crystals. The Czochralski method of growing single crystals of silicon is used to this day in the mass production of microprocessors. Cardiac surgery robots The second important project brings together high technology and the medical sciences. Scientists at the Foundation for the Development of Cardiosurgery (founded by the late Dr. Zbigniew Religa) have created a series of cardiac surgery robots known as the Robin Heart Family. The team is also working on an artificial heart. The Robin Heart robots are high-precision surgical devices for use in cardiac surgery. Currently, the only country that produces cardiac surgery robots is the United States. The Polish-designed robots currently being developed will represent an advance on American technology in this area and are the only such under development in Europe. The robots greatly reduce the invasive nature of cardiac surgery and decrease risks associated with surgery for the patient. They also make it possible to conduct operations at a distance (teleoperations). During such an operation, an advisor supports the robot operator with an intelligent database containing all clinical data on the patient. The new Polish robot is still being tested and has not yet been used to operate on a human being. The most advanced operations to date have been on pigs, including open-heart surgery conducted via tele-operation in February 2011 by two clinics miles apart from each other in Silesia, in southern Poland.