LONDON: For more than a decade, engineers have been trying to make television displays out of quantum dots.
Now, researchers at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, South Korea, have presented the first full-colour display by building pixels using an old-fashioned printing technique.
Quantum-dot displays promise to be more energy-efficient and have sharper screen images than anything available currently, reports Nature.
The quantum dots emit light at a specific wavelength that can be tuned by changing the size of the quantum dots.
Previous attempts to commercialise the technology have faced challenges because image quality tended to decrease with the size of the display.
To overcome this obstacle, Byoung Lyong Choi and his colleagues in the current study used a different method for applying the quantum dots to the material's surface.
Instead of spraying the quantum dots onto the material, they created an 'ink stamp' out of a patterned silicon wafer.
They used the stamp to pick up strips of dots made from cadmium selenide, and then stamp them onto the glass substrate to create red, green and blue pixels without using a solvent.
"It took us three years to get the details right, such as changing the speed and the pressure of the stamp to get a 100 percent transfer," said Choi.
The researchers have now produced a 10-cm full-colour display, which has brighter picture and higher energy efficiency than previous quantum dot displays.
The new display is also flexible, meaning it could be rolled up for portability, or used to make flexible lighting.