World's first flexible and skin-like display developed

A team of scientists led by Indian-American Debashis Chanda from University of Central Florida (UCF) developed a nature-inspired technique for creating the world's first full-colour, flexible thin-film reflective display. The findings were published in Nature Communications journal on 11 June 2015.

This technology can help you switch your dress colour to a different colour in the blink of an eye, if someone at a wedding reception is wearing the same dress as yours.

Characteristic features of the display

• The use of Polarization-independent liquid crystals (LC)-plasmonic system makes LC-plasmonic systems more attractive candidates for display, filter and other actively tunable optical technologies.
• It does not need its own light source. Rather, it reflects the ambient light around it. Your camouflage, your clothing, your fashion items- all of that could change with this innovation.
• This display is only about few microns thick, compared to a 100-micron-thick human hair. Such an ultra-thin display can be applied to flexible materials like plastics and synthetic fabrics.

How it was developed?

By using a specially designed nanostructured plasmonic surface in conjunction with high birefringence liquid crystals, the team demonstrated a tunable polarization-independent reflective surface where the colour of the surface is changed as a function of applied voltage.

A large range of colour tunability was achieved by utilizing an engineered surface which allows full liquid crystal reorientation while maximizing the overlap between plasmonic fields and liquid crystal.

In combination with imprinted structures of varying periods, a full range of colours spanning the entire visible spectrum was achieved, paving the way towards dynamic pixels for reflective displays.

Importance of the development

The research has major implications for existing electronics like televisions, computers and mobile devices that have displays considered thin by today's standards but monstrously bulky in comparison.

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