Luminescent electrophoretic particles via miniemulsion polymerization for night-vision electrophoretic displays.

A novel glowing electrophoretic display (EPD) is achieved by luminescent electrophoretic particles (EPs), which is potentially to improve the situation in which the existing EPDs disable in darkness. To combine both modes of reflective and emissive displays, a trilayer luminescence EP is designed and synthesized via an improved miniemulsion polymerization. The luminescence EP is composed of a pigment core, a polystyrene interlayer, and a fluorescent coating. The particle sizes are from 140 to 170 nm, and the size distribution is narrow. Their ζ potential value is -12.4 mV, which is enough to migrate in the electrophoretic fluid by the driving of an electric field. The display performance of the particles in an EPD cell has been characterized under the bias of 20 V. Both the reflectance (491 nm) and fluorescence (521 nm) intensities of the EPD cell remained in a constant range after 30 switches.