Tomorrow's TVs now in nano-technicolour
12 July 2007
Today's top-of-the-range telly screens could soon be out of the picture, thanks to new nano display technology. Scientists have invented a liquid nano-material that changes colour with the power of magnetism.
Antenna finds out how it works...
Image: istockphoto.com
The ingenious material is made up of tiny iron oxide particles suspended in water. It's simple, but has amazing properties. Moving a simple magnet past the liquid controls a rainbow's worth of potential colours.
The liquid displays brilliant colours that change from blue to red as the magnetic field gets weaker.
Image: Yin laboratory, UCR
It's the first time scientists have made a magnetically controlled material that can change colour across the whole spectrum. The new liquid reacts in an instant too and can keep changing colour time and time again.
What's the secret?
The tiny magnetic particles form a crystal structure in water that can expand or contract depending on the strength of the magnetic field around them. When the magnetic force is strong, the particles pack together tightly, which changes the way light reflects off them and, in turn, the colour we see.
Each iron oxide particle is only 100 nanometres wide. You could fit 10,000 of them onto a pinhead.
Image: Yin laboratory, UCR
'We're really excited by this material's potential,' says Yadong Yin, the nano-liquid's lead researcher. 'It's the first system that changes colour over the entire range of visible light, from violet to red.
'It shows that an ordinary material such as iron oxide, if made into nano-scale particles, can have new properties that don't exist normally.'
Yadong Yin, Department of Chemistry, University of California, Riverside, USA.
Image: Yin laboratory, UCR
Now the scientists hope the nano-liquid could be used to create the ultimate in electronic displays, forming millions of 'liquid' pixels.
And because the colours are formed using reflected light, these displays would have advantages over today's technology - they'd still work well in direct sunlight, unlike expensive LCD monitors.
iStockphoto.com/jallfree
'Our technology could even be used to make rewritable electronic paper,' says Yadong. 'The pictures and words could be written in the form of different colours using a magnetic field. Once this is possible, we could save our forests by cutting the need for regular paper,' he says.
Image: Stock.XCHNG/quil
Sue Mossman, Materials Science specialist at the Science Museum, is impressed.
'It's stimulating to see how people are adapting nanotechnology to new devices. This new material could be applied to a whole range of electronic gadgets, including personal electronics such as iPods, mobiles and watches with coloured screens.'
Sue Mossman, Curator of Materials Science at the Science Museum.