Swiss Invent a Muscular Display Artificial muscles that
manipulate diffraction gratings may bring truer color and a
sharper image As big as a picture window, yet thin enough to
hang on the wall, today’s high-end display would be perfect if
only it offered more detail and true color. Now researchers at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich propose to
solve both these problems with moveable gratings that break
white light into a rainbow and bend the right part of it to a
spot on the screen. In a paper published in the 1 September
edition of the journal Optics Letters, Manuel Aschwanden, a
graduate student at the institute, and his advisor,
nanotechnology professor Andreas Stemmer, predict that the
technology will allow screens to reproduce every color visible
to the human eye and offer print-quality resolution. Optical
gratings are regular arrays of fine lines that deflect light
with a combination of diffraction and wave interference. Because
each wavelength reacts differently, white light will se