Artificial-Muscle Display

A tunable diffraction grating. The vertical membrane is made of artificial muscle, and has carbon electrodes attached to its sides. The membrane has one side molded into a diffraction grating and coated with gold to increase reflectivity. As the applied voltage varies, so does the periodicity of the diffraction grating, changing the angle of the diffracted light.

Reported by: Aschwanden and Stemmer, Optics Letters, 1 September 2006

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