Scientists from Oxford find a way to draw images 70 micrometers across

Jul 10, 2014 06:58 GMT  ·  By

LG has just unveiled an 18-inch OLED display that can roll into a tight tube, and now a team of scientists from Oxford University have come up with an even better way to enable the creation of screens with high resolution and flexibility.

It's actually kind of ironic really. LG manages to surprise the world with something that everyone on the display market has been looking forward to, only to have its bubble burst almost immediately.

We suppose the company can take solace in the fact that all new display technologies need some time before they win the general public over, so its OLED solution won't be dead in the water from the start.

And so we reach the main topic: a team of scientists from Oxford University have discovered a method for creating what they have dubbed “nano-pixels.”

These pixels are only a few hundred nanometers in thickness, meaning that you can use them to draw complex images on “sheets” of screen less than a hair's breadth across, literally.

Still images have been created by means of an atomic force microscope. The team didn't stop there, though, and also showed how those images (which they call “stacks”) can be electrically switched “on and off” at will.

This switching allows them to be used, much like building blocks, in displays with extremely high resolution, beyond even 4K UHD (3840 x 2160 pixels) or anything else available today.

So, essentially, the tiny “images” of 300 by 300 nanometers become prototype pixel-like devices that can work in tandem to draw larger images visible with the naked eye.

The secret to their success goes like this: a 7 nm layer of a phase change material (Germanium-Antimony-Tellurium in this case, GST) is sandwiched between two layers of a transparent electrode. The electrode can use a tiny current to draw images within the sandwich “stack.”

The GST layers are made by bombarding the material with high-energy particles, causing atoms from the target to be deposited onto another material as a thin film.

Smart glasses, synthetic retinas, foldable screens, and paper-thin flexible displays for any applications can be created by using this new technology. And, for once, costs are not a concern, because the displays can use cheap materials and will be solid-state (reliable and easy to manufacture). Moreover, these thin screens could have a backlight that can be switched from a power-saving mode (for e-book reading or such) to a full-power mode (for video).