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Next-gen 'metasurface' could come to your flat screens in 10 years

For the longest time, liquid crystal displays (LCD) dominated the screen display market. The primary reason? Production costs, lifespan, and energy consumption have all worked well for LCDs.

Until now.

Researchers from the Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom, The Australian National University (ANU), and UNSW Canberra have developed a new technology that could herald the "new-generation" of thinner, higher-resolution, and more energy-efficient screens and electronic devices, according to a press release.

"The capability of conventional displays has reached its peak and is unlikely to significantly improve in the future due to multiple limitations. Today there is a quest for fully solid-state flat display technology with a high-resolution and fast refresh rate," Dragomir Neshev, Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) and Australian National University Professor in Physics, said in a statement.

The team has engineered electrically tunable arrays of nanoparticles called 'metasurfaces' that can perform better and offer multiple benefits over LCDs and LEDs. For instance, the metasurfaces are 100 times thinner than liquid crystal cells, offer a "tenfold" greater resolution, and consume 50 percent less energy.

"The most important metrics of flat panel displays are pixel size and resolution, weight, and power consumption. We have addressed each of these with our meta-display concept," said lead researcher Mohsen Rahmani, Professor of Engineering at Nottingham Trent University.

PhD scholar Kosro Zangeneh with the 'metasurface'.

Jamie Kidston/ANU 

The technology reduces an enormous amount of energy consumption

The researchers believe that the most significant advantage of their technology is the massive reduction of energy consumption. "This is excellent news given the number of monitors and TV sets being used in households and businesses every single day. We believe it is time for LCD and LED displays to be phased out in the same way as former cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs over the past ten to 20 years," said Rahmani.

"Our pixels are made of silicon, which offers a long life span in contrast with organic materials required for other existing alternatives. Moreover, silicon is widely available, CMOS compatible with mature technology, and cheap to produce," Professor Andrey Miroshnichenko, a lead researcher in the Nanophotonics team at UNSW Canberra, stressed.

The researchers hope a large-scale prototype can be achieved within the next five years, along with generating high-definition images. Once that's done, the technology will be integrated into flat screens and made available to the public within a decade.

"There is significant room for further improvements by employing artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to design and realize even smaller, thinner, and more efficient metasurface displays," said Dr. Lei Xu, a team member from Nottingham Trent University.

Their findings are published today in Light: Science & Applications.

Study Abstract:

In the last decades, metasurfaces have attracted much attention because of their extraordinary light-scattering properties. However, their inherently static geometry is an obstacle to many applications where dynamic tunability in their optical behaviour is required. Currently, there is a quest to enable dynamic tuning of metasurface properties, particularly with fast tuning rate, large modulation by small electrical signals, solid state and programmable across multiple pixels. Here, we demonstrate electrically tunable metasurfaces driven by thermo-optic effect and flash-heating in silicon. We show a 9-fold change in transmission by <5?V biasing voltage and the modulation rise-time of <625 µs. Our device consists of a silicon hole array metasurface encapsulated by transparent conducting oxide as a localised heater. It allows for video frame rate optical switching over multiple pixels that can be electrically programmed. Some of the advantages of the proposed tuning method compared with other methods are the possibility to apply it for modulation in the visible and near-infrared region, large modulation depth, working at transmission regime, exhibiting low optical loss, low input voltage requirement, and operating with higher than video-rate switching speed. The device is furthermore compatible with modern electronic display technologies and could be ideal for personal electronic devices such as flat displays, virtual reality holography and light detection and ranging, where fast, solid-state and transparent optical switches are required.

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 24.02.2023

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