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A team of physicists and engineers has made a stunning discovery: LED pixels the size of a virus. This extreme miniaturization could transform display design and expand the use of displays in next-generation medical technologies and electronics.
An international team of physicists, engineers, ophthalmologists and photonics experts has taken a bold step towards the future of digital displays. Scientists from Zhejiang University in China, working with colleagues at the University of Cambridge in the UK, have succeeded in creating LED pixels as small as a virus. The secret? A mineral called perovskite.
Smaller, brighter and more efficient
The challenge was old: How to further reduce pixel size without losing quality and without increasing costs?
The answer came from nature. Perovskite, already known for its promising use in solar cells, has shown potential to also revolutionize displays.
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Researchers have fabricated tiny perovskite semiconductors capable of emitting light when receiving electricity.
In tests, these LEDs shone with the same intensity as traditional models. Without any loss of efficiency. And best of all, without increasing production costs.
A breakthrough on a nanoscale
Excited, the scientists decided to go even further. They further reduced the size of the LEDs until they were just 90 nanometers wide — about the size of a virus.
It's a number impressive. This allowed achieving a pixel density of 127.000 per inch, a new record.
For comparison, high-resolution cell phone screens typically have between 400 and 500 pixels per inch. The difference is huge.
Applications and limitations of LED pixels
Despite the progress, the work is still in the experimental phase. The LEDs created so far are monochromatic, that is, they only emit a single color.
The next step will be to find out whether it is possible to produce colored versions with the same efficiency.
Another open question is durability. Scientists still don't know how long these LEDs would last in real-world use, in devices such as cell phones, augmented reality glasses or portable screens.
Technology for the future
There is also a physical limit that researchers recognize: human vision has a maximum capacity to perceive details.
In other words, at some point, making the pixel smaller stops making a difference to the user.
Still, the team believes this technology could be useful in very specific niches, such as ultra-high-resolution augmented reality devices.
Perovskite LEDs are not yet ready for the market. But the technical advance shows that new solutions are emerging to make the displays of the future even sharper, more compact and more affordable.
Study published in the journal Nature.
