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Science & technologyDec 4th 2021 edition

Through a glass, brightly
Unbreakable phone screens could be made with a new material

Perovskites toughen up displays

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Dec 1st 2021

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SINCE 2006, when Corning, an American glassmaker, developed Gorilla
Glass to give Apple's first iPhone a scratch-resistance screen, many
other types of toughened glass have appeared for use in handsets. But
as rugged as they are, people keep cracking and breaking them.
Jingwei Hou thinks he has found a way to prevent that.

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Dr Hou and his colleagues at the University of Queensland, in
Australia, are among a number of researchers working on a group of
materials called perovskites. The original perovskite, calcium
titanium oxide, is a mineral (see picture) discovered in the Ural
mountains in 1839 and named after Count Lev Perovski, a Russian
mineralogist. Since then, the name has come to be used for a number
of materials that share a similar crystal structure.

Much of the interest in perovskites comes because those which combine
metal atoms with chlorine, bromine or iodine (members of a group of
elements called halogens) are semiconductors. This makes them
potentially useful in a variety of electronics. In particular, one
promising feature of metal halides is that they can be used to make
new types of solar cells which are more efficient at converting
sunlight into electricity than the silicon-based cells currently
employed. Oxford PV, a British company, is bringing some of the first
perovskite solar cells to market.

However, what works in one direction will often work in the other,
and so it is with perovskites. This means that instead of converting
sunlight into electricity, metal-halide perovskites can operate in
reverse, by emitting light in response to an electric current. An
array of tiny specks of perovskites could therefore work like a grid
of LEDs in a display screen.

To produce such screens, Dr Hou and his team developed a way to bind
tiny "nanocrystals" of lead-halide perovskites into a specially
treated synthetic glass composite. As these nanocrystals are
extremely sensitive, and decay rapidly if exposed to moisture in the
air, being bound up in the glass protects them. It also prevents lead
ions, which are toxic, leaching out of the material. At the end of
their lives, the screens would be recyclable.

A study Dr Hou carried out in collaboration with teams from Britain
and France, which was published recently in Science, showed that
perovskite screens made in this way were efficient light emitters
able to produce sharp, bright images. The light could also be tuned
to different colours by altering the nanocrystals' characteristics.

An added bonus was that the screens were extremely tough, because of
the way the nanocrystals bonded with the glass. That was helped by
the mechanical structure of the glass (known technically as a
zeolitic imidazolate framework) having a spongelike atomic
arrangement. This provides a degree of flexibility, thus avoiding
breakage problems caused by brittleness.

In as much as anything can be considered unbreakable, perovskite
screens just might be that, reckons Dr Hou--and they might be used not
just for phones, but also for products ranging from televisions and
computers to lighting. But he does think it could take five to ten
years of development before this will happen. In the meantime, people
should take a bit more care with the screens on their devices. #

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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "Through a glass, brightly"

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