Maybe you thought that with OLED TVs we went as far as we could go in terms of electronic thinness. Or maybe you think that the thinner they are, the more expensive they become. Wrong! The Georgia Institute of Technology reinvented the notion of thin Tvs by bringing to the market a paper-thin but viable technology.
Slimness is not a problem, but electrical resistance is. To prevent degradation from oxygen and moisture, researchers clothed the conductor’s surface with a one-to-10 nanometers thick layer of polymer. This created a strong surface dipole and turned the conductor into an efficient, low-work function electrode.
Then, you just need water or methoxyethanol as dilute solutions to come up with polymers, which one can find available to purchase.
As I was saying above, this doesn’t need to have “expensive” written all over it. Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE) guarantees that the result is cheap, doesn’t harm the environment and works just fine with the already established production techniques.
More importantly, it’s the first step towards making such devices affordable to the general public. I mean… is it just me or this paper-thin, harmless and on top of all cheap TV thing seems too good to be true?
[via Treehugger]
