Invisible displays could be integrated into walls and windows with ease in the future after engineers at the University of California Berkeley successfully demonstrated a bright-light emitting device that is millimeters wide and fully transparent when turned off.
The light emitting material in the device is a monolayer semiconductor, which is just three atoms thick.
As well as transparent display applications, researchers believe the technology could be used in light emitting tattoos.
On the UC Berkeley website, Der-Hsien Lien, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and a co-first author of a paper detailing the research, said: “The materials are so thin and flexible that the device can be made transparent and can conform to curved surfaces.”
Lien woekd with Matin Amani and Sujay Desai, both doctoral students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley, to author the study, published March 26 in the journal Nature Communications. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.
The device, developed in the laboratory of Ali Javey, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley, is a proof-of-concept. The researchers acknowledge that a viable product is still some way off with efficiency improvements essential.