Miniature Piezomotors

Not Available There is currently a need for lightweight, flexible, electronically driven displays that can be used by soldiers on the modern battlefield for communicating vital warfighting information in a timely manner. Although many technologies already exist for displaying information, the size of these displays is currently limited by the power needed to drive the displays and can not be easily scaled up in size. Moreover, the displays are not very flexible. Work has been done to produce better conducting thin films (such as indium-tin-oxice) that are transparent but higher conductivity is needed and these films tend to be very brittle. Recent experimental results demonstrate that photonic bandgap materials can provide a means for producing highly conducting transparent metals with sheet resistance less than 0.2 ohms per square and better than 70% transmissive in the visible waveband. These materials can be readily combined with state of the art polymer processing techniques to provide a viable method for producing the thin, flexible, optically transparent conducting sheets required for both military and commercial display systems. The research proposed here will address this opportunity and demonstrate the ability to combine metals with optical devices that previously were thought impossible.