Kyoto, Japan -- Over the past several decades, light sources have gradually transitioned to light emitting diodes, or LEDs, and inorganic LEDs are now used across a wide range of applications. In parallel, organic LEDs, OLEDs, have become widely used in display technologies. OLEDs in particular offer significant advantages in devices such as smartphones, including higher resolution and lower power consumption. All LEDs operate based on spontaneous emission, which is inherently broadband, and OLEDs in particular produce broad emission spectra.

Narrowing this spontaneous emission toward a monochromatic limit would greatly increase its utility: a goal that has long been a central pursuit in photonics. For example, a narrower emission would achieve more highly saturated colors in LED-based displays. While organic materials offer the advantage of tunable emission wavelengths through molecular design, achieving extremely small emission bandwidths remains a major challenge.

Recent advances in molecular design have enabled the development of narrowband organic emitters, particularly multiple resonance emitters developed by Takuji Hatakeyama of Kyoto University. These materials are known for their narrow emission spectra and high color purity. However, even these emitters still exhibit significantly broader spectra than ideal monochromatic light.

New material works like a cell’s dynamic internal skeleton, assembling and disassembling as it stores and releases energy. It can harvest energy from sunlight or other sources and store it in the dark. Material could open the door for clean, renewable energy that doesn’t require plastics or metals. First report of a material that stores energy by physically rebuilding itself.

New computing techniques — including AI and quantum computing — are enabling UW researchers to design unique and complex quantum materials.

AI systems are increasingly browsing the web, executing code, managing files, and sending messages without step-by-step human approval, raising new risks in the process, according to a new TechBrief from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Technology Policy Council (TPC) on the rise of agentic AI.

New research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) decodes how mesothelioma evades immunotherapy; shows why a common kidney cancer treatment combination falls short; and supports a free, open-source AI-driven drug discovery initiative.

As health-conscious consumers continue to seek lower alcohol content in their wine, scientists like Zachary Bean are working on ways to both meet this demand and make it better. Bean, a master’s student in the department of food science for the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas, was awarded an Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation scholarship to carry out his research on fermentation-based strategies that reduce alcohol in wines at Graz University of Technology.

In addition to finding ways to ferment grape juice without producing as much alcohol, Bean’s work also explores novel yeasts and methods to overproduce aromas to compensate for their eventual loss when reducing alcohol through grape juice dilution.