- Quiral semiconductors use some tricks of Mother Nature
- The same brightness with much less energy use
- Great implications for future computers and screens
A new innovative OLED technology could mean smart watches with a longer battery duration, more efficient energy televisions and even brighter screens.
The advance comes from researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Technological University of Eindhoven, and revolves around what is called Chiral semiconductors.
The research shows that these semiconductors can offer brightness and efficiency “records”, and that could be a big problem for any device with a screen from the smallest smart watch to the most massive OLED TV.
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One of the greatest energy drains on the screens is the use of polarization layers, which on OLED televisions are generally used to reduce environmental light escape, guarantee the precise contrast by which technology is known. But this filtering process absorbs a lot of light: the American Polarizers Inc firm says that any polarizer absorbs more than 50% of the light that crosses it; That is much wasted energy.
This new technology is different because it makes its own polarization.
According to the Technological University of Eindhoven, the semiconductor that researchers have developed emit circularly polarized light that “carries information about the” left or right hand “of electrons.” When normal silicon semiconductors are symmetrical, chiral molecules are left or right -handed and reflected with each other. The most famous example of that is in DNA, where they form the double helix we know very well.
Making Quiral semiconductors has proven to be very difficult, but researchers have found a way. Inspired by nature, the researchers created right spiral columns and left -handed from pilas of semiconductor molecules. And those columns could transform the best OLED televisions, the best smart watches and everything else.
According to Professor Sir Richard Friend from the University of Cambridge, who directed the research, “unlike rigid inorganic semiconductors, molecular materials offer incredible flexibility, which allows us to design completely new structures, such as Quiral LEDs. It is like working with a lego set with all kinds that you can imagine, instead of only rectangular bricks.”
The semiconductor that the equipment has created is based on a material known as triazatruxen or tat for abbreviation. Self -assembla in a propeller and electrons can spiral along it; The university describes it as the head of a screw.
These structures can be incorporated into the OLED panels, as explained by the co-direct author Rituparno Chowdhury, of the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge. “We have essentially rework the standard recipe to make OLEDs as we have on our smartphones, which allows us to catch a chiral structure within a stable and non -crystallizing matrix.”
Circularized and polarized LEDs demonstrated “record efficiency, brightness and polarization, which makes them the best of its kind,” says the Technological University of Eindhoven.
We are still seeing this technology on any of the best televisions. But it is a great advance that is relevant not only for televisions and other electronic items. According to the Technological University of Eindhoven, it also has great implications for quantum computing and what is known as “Spintronics”: a research field that uses the electrons to store and process information, and that one day can lead to faster and more safe computers.
