Compared to the LED screens we had a couple of years ago, today’s versions are much better. But with just about anything, we can always make something that is good even better and that is what has been done with LED’s. According to Gizmodo, a Princeton engineer found a new way to make LED’s with a brighter screen, energy efficient, and most importantly, five times clearer. What makes things even better is that now with this new technique of building them, LED’s will last even longer!
The man behind the technology is Professor Stephen Chou. Professor Chou is known by his nanotechnology breakthrough back in 2012 that increased solar cell efficiency by 175 percent. Now in this day and age, he has taken the same principle of his nanotechnology and applied it to making LED’s. In a press release, Professor Chou said, “From a viewpoint of physics, a good light absorber, which we had for the solar cells, should also be a good light radiator.” Chou later added, “We wanted to experimentally demonstrate this is true in visible light range, and then use it to solve the key challenges in LEDs and displays.”
The key challenge that scientist run into when it comes to LED displays is that all of the light does not emit through the LED structure. LED technology is extremely efficient but only emits 2- to 4-percent of the light. The rest of the light gets trapped under the casing, similar to how light gets trapped under water. With Chou’s technology, the problem that LED’s currently have gets taken away. The way Chou’s technology works is by using a nano structure called plasmonic cavity with subwavelength hole-array. Its pretty much a wire mesh that comes in at 15 nanometers thick. The wire mesh directs the lights emitting from the display more towards the users instead of getting trapped under the LED casing. With less light getting trapped under the casing, less heat is created which results in a longer life-span on the LED screen. With Chou’s world renowned technology implemented in LED screens, it will be cheap to manufacture organic and inorganic LED’s. Right now Professor Chou and Princeton University are waiting for their patents to go through. In a couple of years, we’ll probably start noticing how more bright and clear our screens are.
