Ever since 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, quantum dots have been in a market struggle to displace light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a backlight source for liquid crystal displays (LCDs).
Now an advance by a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea and Dow Chemical may turn the display market on its head by eliminating the need for backlights in LCD devices. They have produced a LED pixel out of nanorods capable of both emitting and detecting light.
In the video below, you can get a further description of how the nanorods manage to both detect and emit light as well as some pretty attractive future applications, like mobile phones that can “see” without the need of a camera lens or communicate with each other using Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) technology.
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_ Semiconductors_
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Nanorods Emit and Detect Light, Could Lead to Displays That Communicate via Li-Fi
By Dexter Johnson
Posted 9 Feb 2017 | 18:12 GMT
A laser stylus writes on a small array of multifunction pixels made by dual-function LEDs than can both emit and respond to light.
Gif: Moonsub Shim/University of Illinois/IEEE Spectrum
Ever since 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, quantum dots have been in a market struggle to displace light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a backlight source for liquid crystal displays (LCDs).
Now an advance by a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea and Dow Chemical may turn the display market on its head by eliminating the need for backlights in LCD devices. They have produced a LED pixel out of nanorods capable of both emitting and detecting light.
In the video below, you can get a further description of how the nanorods manage to both detect and emit light as well as some pretty attractive future applications, like mobile phones that can “see” without the need of a camera lens or communicate with each other using Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) technology.
“It’s very different from the use of quantum dots as backlight,” explained Moonsub Shim, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and co-author of the paper, in an interview with IEEE Spectrum. “In backlight displays you have white light that gets diffused into a plane and color filters create your red, green and blue pixels. But here the individual pixels would be these nanorods that would emit a specific color, so you wouldn’t need a backlight.”
In research described in the journal Science, the international team of researchers mixed three types of semiconductors to produce engineered nanorods. “The nanorods contain three different semiconductor materials,” explains Shim. “The first semiconductor, which is attached at the tips of the nanorod, is the quantum dot that emits and absorbs visible light.” The other two semiconductors are the main body of the rod and the shell around the quantum dot. These components facilitate and control the flow of electrons (negative charges) and holes (positive charges) to and from the quantum dot.