Nature Commun. 5, 3152 (2014)

See-through displays are increasingly used in aviation and automotive applications, as well as in gaming and entertainment. The most common technology used to fabricate them relies on transparent organic light-emitting diodes, but cheaper and more scalable alternatives based on light-responsive elements dispersed in a glassy or polymeric matrix are being studied at present. Following the latter approach, Chia Wei Hsu and colleagues now realize a transparent screen that displays bright, blue images projected onto it from a commercial laser projector. In a polymeric film, the researchers embedded silver nanoparticles that have a localized surface plasmon resonance in the blue spectral range; the fabricated film therefore scatters this colour while being almost completely transparent in the remaining visible spectral range. The researchers suggest that dispersion in a single matrix of metallic nanoparticles with sharp plasmonic resonances tuned at different wavelengths will lead to the realization of multicoloured transparent displays.