Nanotechnology: Transparent silver screens
Nature Communications
January 22, 2014
A transparent display based on the reflection of laser light by silver nanoparticles is reported this week in Nature Communications. The display, which could be used for augmented reality devices where your view of the world is enhanced using digital images overlaid onto real ones, is easy to manufacture and offers a wide viewing angle.
Silver nanoparticles have narrow optical resonances that cause them to scatter light of a specific wavelength, and are almost transparent at other colours. Chia Wei Hsu and colleagues have now embedded such nanoparticles into a polymer film. They find that if the image of an object is projected onto the screen by a laser tuned to the colour of this resonance, the light will be reflected by the nanoparticles, making the image visible, whereas other light passes through. By using nanoparticles sensitive to the three primary colours, the team could create a full-colour display. Initial tests showed that a single-colour display performed well and the colour of objects behind the screen changed only slightly as a result of the light scattering.
Although the use of lasers may limit mass-market applications, such films could be used as wind-screen displays in cars or airplanes, for example.
doi: 10.1038/ncomms4152
Research highlights
-
Jun 24
Sport science: New wearable sensor to measure neck strain may detect potential concussionScientific Reports
-
Jun 23
Scientific community: Women credited less than men in scientific paper authorshipNature
-
Jun 22
Planetary science: Modelling electrolyte transport in water-rich exoplanetsNature Communications
-
Jun 15
Robotics: Taking millimetre-scale origami robots for a spinNature Communications
-
Jun 9
Astrophysics: A new repeating fast radio burstNature
-
Jun 2
Quantum computing: Photonic processor lights up the route to quantum computingNature