Scientists have created the world’s smallest pixels, by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold, that could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings.
The colour pixels, developed by scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost.
It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background.
However, making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers.
According to the research developed in the journal Science Advances, at the centre of the pixels is a tiny particle of gold a few billionths of a metre across.
The grain sits on top of a reflective surface, trapping light in the gap in between. Surrounding each grain is a thin sticky coating which changes chemically when electrically switched, causing the pixel to change colour across the spectrum.
“These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible,” said Jeremy J Baumberg, a professor at University of Cambridge, who led the research.
“The strange physics of light on the nanoscale allows it to be switched, even if less than a tenth of the film is coated with our active pixels,” Baumberg said in a statement.
“That’s because the apparent size of each pixel for light is many times larger than their physical area when using these resonant gold architectures,” he said. (PTI)
