http://phys.org/news/2015-06-world-f...skin-like.html
Quote:
A team led by Professor Debashis Chanda of UCF's NanoScience Technology Center and the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) has developed a technique for creating the world's first full-color, flexible thin-film reflective display.
Chanda's research was inspired by nature. Traditional displays like those on a mobile phone require a light source, filters and a glass plates. But animals like chameleons, octopuses and squids are born with thin, flexible, color-changing displays that don't need a light source - their skin.
"All manmade displays - LCD, LED, CRT - are rigid, brittle and bulky. But you look at an octopus, they can create color on the skin itself covering a complex body contour, and it's stretchable and flexible," Chanda said. "That was the motivation: Can we take some inspiration from biology and create a skin-like display?"
As detailed in the cover article of the June issue of the journal Nature Communications, Chanda is able to change the color on an ultrathin nanostructured surface by applying voltage. The new method doesn't need its own light source. Rather, it reflects the ambient light around it.
A thin liquid crystal layer is sandwiched over a metallic nanostructure shaped like a microscopic egg carton that absorbs some light wavelengths and reflects others. The colors reflected can be controlled by the voltage applied to the liquid crystal layer. The interaction between liquid crystal molecules and plasmon waves on the nanostructured metallic surface played the key role in generating the polarization-independent, full-color tunable display.
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More at the source.
Expect commercial products using this around 2025-30.