THE SWEDES seem to have stolen a march in the international race to build flat, flexible, full-colour screens for PCs or TVs using the potentially cheaper technology of polymer light-emitting diodes rather than liquid crystal displays.
Research by a Swedish team shows that more than one colour can be produced from a single LED by making it from a mixture of polymers and then simply varying the voltage applied to it. If in future a single LED could be made to produce red, green and blue light, it could become the basic building block for a flat and flexible TV screen.
Each of the polymers commonly in use in LEDs emits a characteristic wavelength of light when a voltage is applied, so they can only be used for single-colour displays. The Swedish researchers first blended pairs of these polymers, and found that the light emitted was a mixture of the ...
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