World's Tiniest LED Display Has Pixels Smaller Than a Virus (nature.com) 61
Scientists at Zhejiang University have created the world's smallest LED display, featuring pixels just 90 nanometers wide -- roughly the size of a typical virus and too tiny to be seen with optical microscopes. The breakthrough, described in Nature this week, uses perovskite semiconductors that maintain brightness even at microscopic scales, giving them an advantage over conventional LEDs.
The research team, led by Baodan Zhao, also demonstrated a larger display with pixels measuring about 100 micrometers (human hair width) that successfully rendered images including a spinning globe.
The research team, led by Baodan Zhao, also demonstrated a larger display with pixels measuring about 100 micrometers (human hair width) that successfully rendered images including a spinning globe.
Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:3)
What is this, a display for ANTS?
No, it's a display for the fleas on ants.
It's a neato parlor trick, but if they are too small to be seen using optics, you have to explain what their "advantage over conventional LEDs" is. No doubt they are useful in some sort of scientific research application where you need tiny light sources, but the article doesn't explain even though it was in Nature.
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Holograms! To make high quality holographic displays we need minuscule pixels.
Also more immediately it could help us make higher quality VR displays.
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"No applications come to mind"?!?!? Seriously, just crickets up in there? Holograms! To make high quality holographic displays we need minuscule pixels.
Thats one application, step 2 would be making the light emitted highly directional so that you have a different visible pixel at the “same location” depending on your viewing angle. We would need to increase pixel count by probably three orders of magnitude more at least to get a decent holographic effect.
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How about within-chip optical links?
There probably ARE lots of applications. Whether they will be reasonable is another matter. (But I have heard of arguments for within-chip optical links. The problem is, in that case they were trying to avoid any electric connections at all, so they were thinking about hings like beam splitters.)
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Re:Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if an object is too small to see with the naked eye, or even a microscope, depending on how many photons it's pushing out it may very well be visible when it's lit up.
Take stars in the night sky for example. An un-illuminated object that far away is way, way too small to be seen with the naked eye, or even a powerful telescope, however as it's generating an astronomical amount of light, we can still see the photons many billions of kilometres away.
With something like this, you could make an array of them with quite high pixel density, but as the individual pixels are so small, they would be invisible unless they're lit up.
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If it can bring me practical video contact lenses bring it on, but it doesn't seem they even need to be any smaller than you can see with the unassisted eye to accomplish invisibility when unpowered.
Re: Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:2)
The pixels would need to be 10x smaller than you can see, if you want something transparent, or theyâ(TM)ll block too much light
If you get too close to light wavelengths, youâ(TM)ll end up creating chromatic aberrations as well
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"If you get too close to light wavelengths, youâ(TM)ll end up creating chromatic aberrations as well"
I was wondering about that - how can you have a red pixel smaller than the wavelength of red light?
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We make transceivers and antennas that are smaller than the RF wave they use.
Yes, the key is resonant frequency and not size. Resonant frequency with the same environment does depend on size but it can be tuned back by electrically adding in the missing length with inductance and capacitance.
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"If you get too close to light wavelengths, youâ(TM)ll end up creating chromatic aberrations as well"
I was wondering about that - how can you have a red pixel smaller than the wavelength of red light?
You don’t need a particular size to emit photons in general, for example the thermal (photon) radiation from micro black holes emits many photons across a very large spectrum (if you count them all) and in every single case is many orders of magnitude smaller than basically any of them. Controlling the output, like directionality or increasing efficiency would require surrounding structure to be compatible with that which appears to be at odds with providing more pixels. But then again, making them
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Excited atoms release photons at a frequency depending of the size of the electron jump, It's a different mechanism.
Re:Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you mean by "smaller than you can see with the unassisted eye?" At what distance?
A contracted human pupil is about 2 mm across. If you want your contacts to be 4k (and actually contacts and not glasses) that's 500 nanometers per pixel. LEDs typically aren't packed shoulder to shoulder, and if you want colour you're probably going to need to divide that area into four, so you're down under 100 nm already. Even smaller if you want to actually see anything through it.
There's also the awkward problem that a contact lens isn't anywhere near the focal point of the eye, so you'll have to play some tricky games with light too, for which smaller active sites might come in handy.
Mojo's prototype seems to use a 1.8 um pitch over a 0.5 mm display, which is a glorious 278 pixels across.
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This reminds me of one of Greg Egan's books (Schild's Ladder, I think?) where, at the beginning, a book character who is about half a centimeter tall attends a meeting in a reduced size space station, where they can see a virtual environment through the means of tiny, tiny lasers painting the view directly onto their (shrunk down) retinas.
I tried imagining that scene, and the technology behind it, and I was awed.
Hard SF is awesome.
Anyway, carry on.
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A lot of hard science fiction is written by scientists or mathematicians. Looks like Egan is the latter.
Also, it looks like we're getting close to laser retinal displays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Display not single LED (Score:2)
Even if an object is too small to see with the naked eye, or even a microscope, depending on how many photons it's pushing out it may very well be visible when it's lit up.
Our eyes can detect single photons in the right situation but seeing light from the display is not the same thing as reading the display. We can see light from distant stars but we can't resolve their discs.
If this were just a really small LED you'd have a point but it isn't, it's an LED display and while there may be uses for a single LED that small it's hard to think of eny use for a display that small.
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If this were just a really small LED you'd have a point but it isn't
I see what you did there, but I had to squint.
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Even if an object is too small to see with the naked eye, or even a microscope, depending on how many photons it's pushing out it may very well be visible when it's lit up.
One needs look no further than hawking radiation. While we don’t have physical examples to examine, a microscopic black hole can easily be far smaller than an atomic nucleus yet emit macroscopic amounts of power like trillions, quadrillions, or quintillions of watts on up getting more intense as the horizon shrinks. Not only would it be macroscopically visible, it would be destroying everything in the immediate vicinity with thermal radiation.
Re:Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I actually thought of an application - custom photolithography.
While 100 um is still massively bigger than current tech, ~28 nm, it could possibly allow rapid printing of custom images.
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I think I actually thought of an application - custom photolithography. While 100 um is still massively bigger than current tech, ~28 nm, it could possibly allow rapid printing of custom images.
Yes, that’s what I first thought of too. If you could remove the stenciling process such that you had only to apply light directly in a pixel to pixel fashion it could if nothing else vastly reduce the amount of equipment and bring custom chip fabrication into one’s hands for less money.
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Re: Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:2)
Yes! (Score:2)
Yes, it is for my colony and me. ;)
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We can use this display in conjunction with nano-scale computer inputs to give viruses access to Facebook, making it much easier for them to initiate genocide against each other :-P
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They should be small enough to dynamically create the interference patterns for holograms. I.e. true dynamic 3d displays without any need for glasses or other tricks.
Viruses (Score:3)
That GIF of the display made me realise that viruses are larger than I thought.
Re: Viruses (Score:2)
The gif in the article has 100um monochromatic pixels. The phone Iâ(TM)m typing this on has 55um rgb pixels.
The rest of the article is paywalled , so who knows what size display they made with the 90nm pixels
Re:Viruses [size dispute] (Score:2)
It's comparing to pre-Ozempic viruses.
In future TV news ... (Score:5, Funny)
LED TVs have gone viral.
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Netflix and mutate?
Contact lenses with an 8K screens will be reality (Score:3)
The future looks bright, Facebook will never be the same.
The 100 micron demo is pathetic (Score:1)
My old Pixel 7a has 60 micrometer wide pixels, what's the point of this "demo"?
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Yeah I didn't get that either. Actually your Pixel 7a has 20 micrometer wide pixels .. they are R G B to form one "pixel" whereas the demo only had one G pixel.
Re: The 100 micron demo is pathetic (Score:2)
Nanometer micrometer.
Re: The 100 micron demo is pathetic (Score:2)
... and of course I shouldn't reply from my phone, where I don't get an edit button to fix the missing less-than sign. Anyway, the 90nm demo is pretty impressive, if it actually produces amounts of light visible to the naked eye. And even if it doesn't, it may have applications in instruments.
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My immediate thought was photolithography in microchip fabrication. There are plants out there printing with feature sizes larger than 90nm. It could really simplify printing custom chips.
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I don't know if that would have made a difference. I know full well what a nanometer is and what a micrometer is. The demo shows a display that's 3-4 cm wide, with a pixel count in the hundreds. There's no confusion about the units.
It will be a real money maker (Score:1)
Now we can show ads to virusesâ¦.
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wait... ads ON viruses... advertising via virus... viral advertising.
OMG. Did you catch that new ad?
Opens up a whole new front in medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
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Instead of killing viruses in the human body, neutralize them byjust distracting them with social media on tiny screens
That’s right, show them a little virus on cell action, let them think they are reproducing while they drool onto the screen.
Re:Social media for viruses (Score:2)
"The Haitian parameciums are eating all the bacteria!"
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Seriously though, I wonder if you could produce a UV LED that is small enough to kill off viruses or cancel cells or something, while not damaging things around it.
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If you could, the problem would be getting it in position. And if you could get it in position, we've got many current methods that are just too dangerous to use out of position.
Department of sensationalistic science reporting (Score:2)
In the journals Nature (and Science), the main articles are new research, but they also have "News" and other such editorial sections where they can draw attention to key items inside. The quote at the head of this Slashdot report comes from their News sales-summary. The primary article it refers to is actually good, not sensationalistic mumbo-jumbo.
Read the start of the nonsense article at https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] .
Then see the real article (pay-walled, just the abstract) at https://www.nature.c [nature.com]
Perfect for elon musk (Score:1)
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A lot of the responses here are making jokes about viruses (that's fun) or are insulting the report becasue they made a monochrome spinning globe at resolutions less than current smartphone screens.
They miss the point - which comes through when you read the report.
See my post above, "Department of sensationalistic science reporting"
What the authors showed was that, "they can use perovskite LED's to make devices on current scales (the globe), but also drop down 3 orders of magnitude to make nanometer resolut
virus always physical? (Score:1)
A virus has to be a physical thing then, not a set of conditions or a pattern of bioelectrical impulses?
Dang (Score:1)
small displays (Score:2)
Cool⦠(Score:2)
But, why are images so grainy?