optics.org blog

« The future’s bright | Main | Robo-pet »

Plastic perfection

Yasuhiro Koike believes in the optical properties of plastics and, judging by the number of people who came to hear his plenary discussion, he’s not alone in his view.

Plastics are conventionally thought to be unsuitable optical materials compared with glass because of their poor quality. However, Koike’s research at Keio University in Japan seems to go someway towards challenging this assumption. Koike has developed a highly scattered optical transmission (HSOT) polymer for LCD backlights that exhibit almost twice the brightness of conventional backlights.

The design takes advantage of the scattering effect that occurs when light hits particles with a diameter in the order of micrometres. By adjusting the size of the dopant, Koike found that the direction, angle and intensity of scattering could be controlled. “By injecting a dopant that scattered light at right angles to the surface, we have forced forward scattering only, which has almost doubled the brightness,” said Koike.

The HSOT polymer can already be found in a range of laptops including the Sony Vaio, Panasonic Let’s Not, Samsung and Dell.

Posted by Marie Freebody on April 11, 2008 9:44 AM | Permalink