By
Ayse Guner
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Optics prof nationally funded by a several million dollar grant
Ghassan Jabbour holds the future of display monitors in his hands - the ones that will soon fold up and be carried in pockets.
Jabbour, an assistant professor at UA's optical sciences center, wears 3-foot rubber gloves and inserts his hands into a box that is filled with nitrogen. The box contains about 500 plastic and glass display devices in small containers that are set on top of each other.
He takes a quarter-size plastic device, holds it between his fingertips and bending it, he calls it the OLED, or organic light-emitting diodes. He then places this device neatly into a test box to check how well it emits light.
"Connect it, Rachel," he says to Rachel Radspinner, a graduate student in material sciences.
Radspinner, who works by Jabbour's side, connects the device to a battery where one side of it turns negative and the other side goes to a positive charge.
She then turns the light off in the box, gives an electrical charge to the device and there is a light - shiny and green. This light is 100 times brighter than the average computer display. But, the group has also fabricated devices that produce light 2,000 times brighter at 10 battery volts.
What now is a just test device in Jabbour's lab, in a decade, OLED will allow plastic monitors to be so flexible that they can be rolled up and down like a curtain, Jabbour says.
"You take your laptop and drop it, the screen will break. But you take this thing and drop it, it won't break," he says about the future screens.
Jabbour's lab has been working on these devices for the past six years. Besides the device, they also work on other processing techniques like screen printing, which can make the fabrication much cheaper, he says, adding that screen printing was pioneered by a graduate student two years ago and finished by Radspinner this year.
But nothing gets more attention than OLED, he says.
Last year, for instance, the U.S. Department of Defense granted the research with several million dollars for developing more efficient OLEDs that will show much sharper images on the screen, Jabbour said.
The OLED, originally found and patented by Kodak 14 years ago, will be applied to military devices as well as to anywhere that the light is used. They will also replace the current LCDs, which are flat-panel displays commonly used on laptop and handheld computers.
Although Motorola already offers a color OLED screen on a Web-enabled phone - with sunlight readability when the phone it is tilted around - this organic device will eventually run on the everyday machines like computers, televisions and cell phones. They will be thinner and cheaper, Jabbour says.
In addition, OLEDs will save power and will not contaminate the environment, whereas the current devices do, Jabbour says. The new devices are made out of organic material, as opposed to some of the current inorganic material that might cause poisoning to the environment, he adds.
"We came up with the most efficient devices in the world right now," Jabbour said.
Jabbour works along with his peer Nasser Peyghambarian, an optical sciences professor, who is a collaborator in the research, and eight students who work on various devices including OLED.
And Radspinner, who in addition to her work in OLED, finished the screen printing research yesterday, said she is very excited that the technology she worked on will one day allow for foldable, flexible screens that people would be able to carry around easily.
"It is useful - especially for people who are business-oriented and who want to have contact with the network world," she said. "It is also useful in applications like television, which you can fold it up in your closet.
"You can just roll it up like a poster."
