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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the see-through-is-not-invisible dept.

UC Berkeley engineers have built a bright-light emitting device that is millimeters wide and fully transparent when turned off. The light emitting material in this device is a monolayer semiconductor, which is just three atoms thick.

The device opens the door to invisible displays on walls and windows – displays that would be bright when turned on but see-through when turned off — or in futuristic applications such as light-emitting tattoos, according to the researchers.

“The materials are so thin and flexible that the device can be made transparent and can conform to curved surfaces,” said Der-Hsien Lien, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and a co-first author along with Matin Amani and Sujay Desai, both doctoral students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley.

Their study was published March 26 in the journal Nature Communications. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

[...] This device is a proof-of-concept, and much research still remains, primarily to improve efficiency. Measuring this device’s efficiency is not straightforward, but the researchers think it’s about 1 percent efficient. Commercial LEDs have efficiencies of around 25 to 30 percent.

The concept may be applicable to other devices and other kinds of materials, the device could one day have applications in a number of fields where having invisible displays are warranted. That could be an atomically thin display that’s imprinted on a wall or even on human skin.

“A lot of work remains to be done and a number of challenges need to be overcome to further advance the technology for practical applications,” Javey said. “However, this is one step forward by presenting a device architecture for easy injection of both charges into monolayer semiconductors.”


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:20PM (2 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:20PM (#659478) Journal

    Stop culling my forest when I'm not looking

    I believe the pithy phrase you might have been rooting around for in your trunk of ideas was "Leaf my forest alone." Unless you were branching out in another direction, and I just didn't twig to it. In which case I thought I was barking when I was actually being a sap.

    I'm feeling pretty chippy, so go ahead — axe me anything.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:30PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:30PM (#659491) Journal

    In which case I thought I was barking when I was actually being a sap.

    Barking mad more likely 👍

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 28 2018, @09:38PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @09:38PM (#659697)

    I saw what you did there!

    I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you stick to your day job, rather than going against the grain and trying to break into comedy.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.