World's Tiniest LED Display Has Pixels Smaller Than a Virus (nature.com)
- Reference: 0176780019
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/03/20/1910204/worlds-tiniest-led-display-has-pixels-smaller-than-a-virus
- Source link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00813-w
The research team, led by Baodan Zhao, also demonstrated a larger display with pixels measuring about 100 micrometers (human hair width) that successfully rendered images including a spinning globe.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00813-w
Viruses (Score:3)
That GIF of the display made me realise that viruses are larger than I thought.
Re: Viruses (Score:2)
The gif in the article has 100um monochromatic pixels. The phone Iâ(TM)m typing this on has 55um rgb pixels.
The rest of the article is paywalled , so who knows what size display they made with the 90nm pixels
Re:Viruses [size dispute] (Score:2)
It's comparing to pre-Ozempic viruses.
In future TV news ... (Score:5, Funny)
LED TVs have gone viral.
Contact lenses with an 8K screens will be reality (Score:3)
The future looks bright, Facebook will never be the same.
The 100 micron demo is pathetic (Score:1)
My old Pixel 7a has 60 micrometer wide pixels, what's the point of this "demo"?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I didn't get that either. Actually your Pixel 7a has 20 micrometer wide pixels .. they are R G B to form one "pixel" whereas the demo only had one G pixel.
Re: The 100 micron demo is pathetic (Score:2)
Nanometer micrometer.
Re: The 100 micron demo is pathetic (Score:2)
... and of course I shouldn't reply from my phone, where I don't get an edit button to fix the missing less-than sign. Anyway, the 90nm demo is pretty impressive, if it actually produces amounts of light visible to the naked eye. And even if it doesn't, it may have applications in instruments.
Re: (Score:2)
My immediate thought was photolithography in microchip fabrication. There are plants out there printing with feature sizes larger than 90nm. It could really simplify printing custom chips.
It will be a real money maker (Score:1)
Now we can show ads to virusesâ¦.
Re: (Score:3)
wait... ads ON viruses... advertising via virus... viral advertising.
OMG. Did you catch that new ad?
Opens up a whole new front in medicine (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of killing viruses in the human body, neutralize them byjust distracting them with social media on tiny screens
Re: (Score:3)
> Instead of killing viruses in the human body, neutralize them byjust distracting them with social media on tiny screens
That’s right, show them a little virus on cell action, let them think they are reproducing while they drool onto the screen.
Re:Social media for viruses (Score:1)
"The Haitian parameciums are eating all the bacteria!"
Department of sensationalistic science reporting (Score:2)
In the journals Nature (and Science), the main articles are new research, but they also have "News" and other such editorial sections where they can draw attention to key items inside. The quote at the head of this Slashdot report comes from their News sales-summary. The primary article it refers to is actually good, not sensationalistic mumbo-jumbo.
Read the start of the nonsense article at [1]https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com] .
Then see the real article (pay-walled, just the abstract) at [2]https://www.nature.c [nature.com]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00813-w
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08685-w
Perfect for elon musk (Score:1)
So he can show pics of his private parts
Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:3)
What is this, a display for ANTS?
No, it's a display for the fleas on ants.
It's a neato parlor trick, but if they are too small to be seen using optics, you have to explain what their "advantage over conventional LEDs" is. No doubt they are useful in some sort of scientific research application where you need tiny light sources, but the article doesn't explain even though it was in Nature.
Re: (Score:1)
One application that immediately comes to mind is ... ummm... well, .... OK, no applications come to mind. I guess sometimes you do things simply because you can.
Re: (Score:1)
"No applications come to mind"?!?!? Seriously, just crickets up in there?
Holograms! To make high quality holographic displays we need minuscule pixels.
Also more immediately it could help us make higher quality VR displays.
Re:Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if an object is too small to see with the naked eye, or even a microscope, depending on how many photons it's pushing out it may very well be visible when it's lit up.
Take stars in the night sky for example. An un-illuminated object that far away is way, way too small to be seen with the naked eye, or even a powerful telescope, however as it's generating an astronomical amount of light, we can still see the photons many billions of kilometres away.
With something like this, you could make an array of them with quite high pixel density, but as the individual pixels are so small, they would be invisible unless they're lit up.
Re: (Score:2)
If it can bring me practical video contact lenses bring it on, but it doesn't seem they even need to be any smaller than you can see with the unassisted eye to accomplish invisibility when unpowered.
Re: Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:2)
The pixels would need to be 10x smaller than you can see, if you want something transparent, or theyâ(TM)ll block too much light
If you get too close to light wavelengths, youâ(TM)ll end up creating chromatic aberrations as well
Re: (Score:2)
"If you get too close to light wavelengths, youâ(TM)ll end up creating chromatic aberrations as well"
I was wondering about that - how can you have a red pixel smaller than the wavelength of red light?
Re: (Score:3)
What do you mean by "smaller than you can see with the unassisted eye?" At what distance?
A contracted human pupil is about 2 mm across. If you want your contacts to be 4k (and actually contacts and not glasses) that's 500 nanometers per pixel. LEDs typically aren't packed shoulder to shoulder, and if you want colour you're probably going to need to divide that area into four, so you're down under 100 nm already. Even smaller if you want to actually see anything through it.
There's also the awkward problem th
Display not single LED (Score:2)
> Even if an object is too small to see with the naked eye, or even a microscope, depending on how many photons it's pushing out it may very well be visible when it's lit up.
Our eyes can detect single photons in the right situation but seeing light from the display is not the same thing as reading the display. We can see light from distant stars but we can't resolve their discs.
If this were just a really small LED you'd have a point but it isn't, it's an LED display and while there may be uses for a single LED that small it's hard to think of eny use for a display that small.
Re:Little fleas have smaller fleas (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I actually thought of an application - custom photolithography.
While 100 um is still massively bigger than current tech, ~28 nm, it could possibly allow rapid printing of custom images.
Re: (Score:1)
High resolution display embedded in a contact lens is a good use.