Indian-origin scientist crafts world's first full-color, flexible thin-film reflective display

Indian origin scientist Dr. Debashis Chanda has achieved breakthrough by creating world's first full-color, flexible thin-film reflective display.

Professor at the University of Central Florida, Dr. Chanda used an iconic National Geographic photographic of an Afghan girl to demonstrate the color-changing abilities of the nanostructured reflective display developed by his team.

Claiming to be inspired by animals like chameleons, octopuses and squids, he said that he was motivated to create a skin-like display, unlike bulky and rigid displays like LCD, LED, CRT.

Chanda has enabled changing 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.

His groundbreaking method is a leap ahead of previous research that could produce only a limited color palette. And the display is only about few microns thick, compared to a 100-micron-thick human hair. Such an ultrathin display can be applied to flexible materials like plastics and synthetic fabrics.

The research has major implications for existing electronics like televisions, computers and mobile devices that have displays considered thin by today's standards but monstrously bulky in comparison. But the potentially bigger impact could be whole new categories of displays that have never been thought of.

This is a cheap way of making displays on a flexible substrate with full-color generation, that's a unique combination, said Chanda.

The research is the cover article of the journal Nature Communications.