Jessica Wade: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s say this research program goes fairly well, not utopian well, but say 90th-percentile well. Thirty years from now, what will we see or what will I use or what will I have that will be the result of this? Or is it 50 years? How do you think about that stuff? I think five years from now — or probably even less because display manufacturers are so extraordinarily quick at the way that they innovate — you’ll see chiral molecules being the active layer of your LED display. If you’ve got an Apple iPhone, or I think Nintendo Switch has an OLED display, or if you’ve got a massive OLED television at home, you could double the efficiency of those displays by just using something that emits circularly polarized light. We’re working on that a bunch in academic research, but display manufacturers are on that too. So in five years, you’ll have that, and your power consumption — you will only see it in that your battery won’t be drained as quickly because you won’t be pushing all of this power into generating light from a pixel, which isn’t very efficient, because you’ll have increased that efficiency. Probably 10 years from now, you’ll see quantum technologies that are enabled by molecules, and particularly by using the topology and the shape of those molecules to make them more efficient, that can do this room-temperature operation. And probably chirality will have some big role to play in that. But like with all areas of science and all areas of any academic aspect that we’re studying — and probably lots of conversations you’ve had around these tables — there’s a lot of jargon, there’s a lot of words. Chirality is an important and useful word for me. It means a lot of different things to people in the quantum world. You can have chiral electrons, you can have chiral phonons. Probably it will be hugely important, but what particular aspects of chirality, I’m not entirely sure yet. But in terms of a new item — we can make screens better; we can make batteries last longer — maybe it’s too early to say, but what new good or service could we expect? Again, assuming things go fairly well.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.