Smart glasses, or eyewear that can project digital information directly into a user’s field of view, are often seen as a cornerstone of future wearable technology. Until now, however, progress has been limited by bulky components and optical constraints that prevent efficient light emission when pixels are reduced to the scale of a single wavelength.
Researchers at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) have now achieved a major breakthrough toward creating bright, ultra-small displays. Using optical antennas, they developed the smallest light-emitting pixel ever produced. The work, led by Professors Jens Pflaum and Bert Hecht, has been detailed in the journal Science Advances.
“With the help of a metallic contact that allows current injection into an organic light-emitting diode while simultaneously amplifying and emitting the generated light, we have created a pixel for orange light on an area measuring just 300 by 300 nanometers. This pixel is just as bright as a conventional OLED pixel with normal dimensions of 5 by 5 micrometers,” says Bert Hecht, describing the key finding of the study. To put this into perspective, a nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter.
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