In recent years, a number of different technologies have been proposed for use in reflective displays. One of the most appealing applications of a reflective display is electronic paper, which combines the desirable viewing characteristics of conventional printed paper with the ability to manipulate the displayed information electronically. Electronic paper based on the electrophoretic motion of particles inside small capsules has been demonstrated and commercialized; but the response speed of such a system is rather slow, limited by the velocity of the particles. Recently, we have demonstrated that electrowetting is an attractive technology for the rapid manipulation of liquids on a micrometre scale. Here we show that electrowetting can also be used to form the basis of a reflective display that is significantly faster than electrophoretic displays, so that video content can be displayed. Our display principle utilizes the voltage-controlled movement of a coloured oil film adjacent to a white substrate. The reflectivity and contrast of our system approach those of paper. In addition, we demonstrate a colour concept, which is intrinsically four times brighter than reflective liquid-crystal displays and twice as bright as other emerging technologies. The principle of microfluidic motion at low voltages is applicable in a wide range of electro-optic devices.

This article deals with the behavior of fluids inside a reflective display based on electrowetting. The advantage of using electrowetting as a principle for a reflective display has been demonstrated [R. A. Hayes and B. J. Feenstra, Nature (London) 425, 383 (2003)]. The principle is based on the controlled two-dimensional movement of an oil/water interface across a hydrophobic fluoropolymer insulator. The main objective of this article is to show experimentally the influence of the oil film curvature on the kinetics of the optical switch. For this we explore the electrowetting behavior and the fluidic motion as a function of several parameters, including addressing voltage, colored oil film thickness, oil type, and device size. The electro-optic characteristics and the switching dynamics of a single electrowetting pixel are studied. The results indicate that the competition between capillary forces and electrostatic forces governs the voltage driven oil contraction while capillary forces only drive the oil relaxation upon voltage removal. Consequently, a major parameter that controls the electrowetting behavior is the curvature of the oil/water interface. When increasing the oil film thickness or decreasing the device size, the oil film curvature increases. Hence, the capillary forces become stronger and the voltage required to achieve a particular oil contraction increases. With increasing curvature of the spherical oil cap, oil film relaxation, which is only capillary driven, is more rapid. The oil viscosity also plays a role in the speed of the oil movement. The reduction of the oil viscosity leads to an increase in the extent and speed of the oil/water interface movement. A linear relationship between the pixel capacitance and the resulting pixel white area percentage is found experimentally and is reconciled with an electrical model.

We describe quantitative imaging of the sheet resistance of metallic thin films by monitoring frequency shift and quality factor in a resonant scanning near-field microwave microscope. This technique allows fast acquisition of images at approximately 10 ms per pixel over a frequency range from 0.1 to 50 GHz. In its current configuration, the system can resolve changes in sheet resistance as small as 0.6 Ω/✷ for 100 Ω/✷ films. We demonstrate its use at 7.5 GHz by generating a quantitative sheet resistance image of a YBa2Cu3O 7−δ thin film on a 5 cm-diameter sapphire wafer.

Anderson-Mott localization behaviour of the low-temperature optical conductivity, while at high frequencies the excitation spectrum resembles that of a conventional semiconductor. The missing spectral weight below the gap energy is redistributed around the gap edge, in disagreement with previous claims based on optical measurements.