Physicist, Eric Mazur, and his graduate students were financed by the Army Research Organization to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces. In the 90′s, Mazur was afraid that the research money would soon stop so he wrote in a new direction into his research proposal, and to this day doesn’t know why he did it. It wasn’t until more recently that he asked a graduate student to pick up on the research. The graduate student then shined a powerful laser on a silicon wafer’s surface and then on a hunch exposed the wafer to sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits.

The result was a black silicon wafer, but under an electron microscope, the surface was riddled with “spikes.” Much like many accidental discoveries, the researchers read more »