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Photo Credit: U News Center University of Utah |
Physicists from the University of
Utah may already have the answer you’re looking for. The university made a
recent announcement on the invention of a “spintronic” organic light-emitting
diode or OLED. This technology promises to deliver brighter, cheaper and more
environment-friendly LEDs than those used in the market today. The OLED
lighting technology can be used for lighting fixtures, electronic devices as
well as television and computer displays to be developed in the years to come.
“It’s a completely different
technology,” says Z. Valy Vardeny, one of University of Utah’s prominent
professors in physics. Though the current prototype made by the Utah physicists
gives off an orange-hued light, Vardeny anticipates the production of red and
blue ones within two years. Having white spin OLEDs is expected to happen
eventually as the technology is improved and perfected over time.
The new OLED technology developed
by the Utah physicists makes use of organic semiconductor that keep information
using the “spins” of the electron which is unlike the traditional storing
process that is based on the electrical charges of electrons. This lighting
technology also makes use of the “organic spin valve” developed by Vardeny
together with other colleagues. This device is only capable of regulating
electrical flow. Through further studies, researchers found out that a possible
modification can allow the instrument to emit light, thus the creation of the
spin OLED technology.
According to Verdeny, it may take
about five years before these new generation LEDs hit the stores. Further
improvements must be made in order to run at room temperature.
This new-generation LED was
developed by Vardeny together with Tho Nguyen and Eitan Ehrenfreund. All three
are equally accomplished physicists in their own right. Nguyen is the first
author of the study while Ehrenfreund is a physicist at the Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology in Haifa.
Funding for the study was
provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy,
Israel Science Foundation and U.S. – Israel Binational Science Foundation.
Visit University of Utah’s news
center for more information on this report.
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