UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, WA, USA. A team of scientists have just created the world’s thinnest-known LED that may be used for more diverse applications. Currently, LED’s or light-emitting diodes are commonly used for modern electronics such as smartphones, tablets, flat screen TVs and other wearable technology. The popularity of modern technology using LEDs is usually based on how thin and fast it can possibly be. In the older times, electronic gadgets became smaller but the quality it brings also had to somewhat suffer.

This is when quality LEDs started coming in. Good electronic gadgets nowadays don’t necessarily have to be small. What’s in it is what everyone would like to know before they even consider buying it. Flat screen TVs and phablets (smartphone almost but not quite as big as a tablet) are two good examples. The competition nowadays deals with how thin an electronic gadget can be and still have the same or even better quality.

Professor Xiaodong Xu, an assistant professor in materials science and engineering and in physics at the University of Washington and his team worked on developing the world’s thinnest-known LED. Professor Xiaodong Xu is also working with Jason Ross, a materials science and engineering graduate student at the same university.

While most consumer electronics are based on 3-D LEDs, this new type of LED is based on flexible 2-D semiconductors which makes it is easier to stack and use for smaller and even more applications. As compared to the conventional LEDs being used today, the LEDs being developed by the team are actually 10 to 20 times thinner. Jason Ross also claims that the LEDs they are developing are 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. At the same time, the light they produce can be seen by standard measurement equipment.

The LED they are developing is made from flat sheets of the molecular semiconductor known as tungsten diselenide. They use regular adhesive tape to extract a single sheet of this material from thick layered pieces. The team of scientists is also finding more ways to work with the newly-developed LED which could possibly open doors to even bigger things that would change the way we see electronic devices in the near future.

Image Courtesy of www.washington.edu