Wu says modifications to material concentrations will increase hardness, though at the expense of flexibility.

Hart says the demonstrated hardness “would not be sufficient” for pocket devices that are likely to come in contact with metal keys, sand, or other rough materials. In practice, this comes at a cost to coating hardness. “The future for displays is flexible displays,” says University of Central Florida professor Lei Zhai. The substrate was also designed for flexibility. The sheet of nanoparticles is then pressed on to the screen surface, leaving behind tiny, spherical wells. “ diameter is about 100 nanometers, and the gap between the particles is about 10 nanometers.” For scale, red blood cells average around 7,500 nanometers in diameter. (Credit: Guanjun Tan) “We first make a template with nanoparticles of silicon dioxide,” says Shintson Wu, professor of optics and photonics, and principal investigator of the study, published Thursday in the journal Optica. This is achieved through nanoscopic pockmarks in the surface, which effectively creates a gradient change in index of refraction from air to glass. They're dark, absorbing as much light as possible to reduce any glimmer that would betray their location to a predator. So how did they do it? FabricationĪ close-up of a moth's eye looks like a dense, meshed screen. The moth-eye anti-reflection coating, however, reflects just 0.23 percent of all incoming light. In 2015, DisplayMate Technologies determined the iPad Mini 4 anti-reflection coating was the best on the market, reflecting just 2 percent of ambient light. Anti-reflective coatings are designed to capture as much ambient light as possible any light not captured gets reflected back producing a glare. “When you're in a car and you've got glare coming off your display or your dashboard, that can actually be a safety issue,” he says. Convenience, notes research associate Shandon Hart at Corning Inc., is not the only consideration. Another solution is to reduce ambient light by shading your phone, but that’s not ideal either. Relying on extra bright screens to outshine reflected light costs battery life. The ability to see your phone’s display is a competition between display brightness and reflected ambient light. The coating reflects about 10 times less light than the best anti-glare technique in commercial use. Researchers from the University of Central Florida and National Taiwan University designed an anti-reflective coating that was inspired by moth eyes. (Credit: Muhammad Naaim) Moth eyes and lotus leaves may be important to the future of touch screens. A close-up of moth's eyes from order Lepidoptera.

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