Chinese physicists, engineers, opticians, and photonics specialists from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, have developed pixels that are the size of a virus. These pixels have been used to make what has been dubbed the world’s smallest light-emitting diode (LED) displays.
Developed with the aid of colleagues from the University of Cambridge, the LED displays are smaller than a grain of sand. This is significant as many displays on electronic devices (like cell phones) upgrade by attempting to pack more pixels into a small space.
In theory, the more pixels you can cram in, the sharper and better the image quality. The current technology for tiny pixels is micro-LEDs, made from II-V semiconductors (a type of compound).
But developing mico-LEDs pose multiple challenges, as going smaller gets expensive and inefficient with current materials. To overcome this, Baodan Zhao from from Zhejiang University and her team experimented with perovskite, an economical and promising material already being studied in solar panels.
Using perovskite, the researchers crafted pixel-sized LEDs just 90 nanometers wide to make nano-scale LEDs (nano-PeLEDs). The team found that unlike traditional LEDs, which tend to fade quickly, these new perovskite-based ones remain impressively bright.
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