Out of the blue - a new phosphor for flat screen displays

Materials chemists in China have developed a compound that they believe should improve the quality of field emission displays (FEDs), bringing applications a step closer. FEDs have, for a number of years, been a promising technology for flat panel displays, but progress has been hampered by the display quality. 

Jun Lin at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, and colleagues developed a phosphor with promising colour properties for FED applications. Phosphors are materials that emit light of a particular wavelength when struck by an electron. They have long been used in cathode ray tubes, and have more recently found application in FEDs. These work by a very similar principle to cathode ray tubes, but instead of a single electron source, a grid of tiny electron sources is used, making flat-panel displays possible.  More...

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2011/March/11031103.asp