* Ok, actually pressed buttons that manipulated the electric field that was trapping the atom and watched the result on a display - lot of physics going on behind the scenes.
I would expect this to be somewhat of a problem with tiny LEDs. In an LED, you inject electrons and holes and you hope that a magical quantum process happens in which an electron and a hole meet, annihilate each other, and emit a photon. But this process is slow, and the electrons and the holes may wander around for a bit before combining. But in a very very small LED, smaller than the mean free path, I’d imagine you might have an issue where the electrons and holes frequently make it all the way across the device without recombining and manage to lose their energy as heat when they hit the opposite electrode. (I have not drawn the diagrams or checked the math here.)
(I took the relevant classes in grad school, but I’ve never done this sort of work academically or professionally, so no promises that I’m right.)
MicroLEDs, with pixels just micrometers across, have long been a byword in the display world. Now, microLED-makers have begun shrinking their creations into the uncharted nano realm. In January, a startup named Polar Light Technologies unveiled prototype blue LEDs less than 500 nanometers across. This raises a tempting question: How far can LEDs shrink?
We know the answer is, at least, considerably smaller. In the past year, two different research groups have demonstrated LED pixels at sizes of 100 nm or less.
These are some of the smallest LEDs ever created. They leave much to be desired in their efficiency—but one day, nanoLEDs could power ultra-high-resolution virtual reality displays and high-bandwidth on-chip photonics. And the key to making even tinier LEDs, if these early attempts are any precedents, may be to make more unusual LEDs.
Take Polar Light’s example. Like many LEDs, the Sweden-based startup’s diodes are fashioned from III-V semiconductors like gallium nitride (GaN) and indium gallium nitride (InGaN). Unlike many LEDs, which are etched into their semiconductor from the top down, Polar Light’s are instead fabricated by building peculiarly shaped hexagonal pyramids from the bottom up.
Polar Light designed its pyramids for the larger microLED market, and plans to start commercial production in late 2026. But they also wanted to test how small their pyramids could shrink. So far, they’ve made pyramids 300 nm across. “We haven’t reached the limit, yet,” says Oskar Fajerson, Polar Light’s CEO. “Do we know the limit? No, we don’t, but we can [make] them smaller.”
Elsewhere, researchers have already done that. Some of the world’s tiniest LEDs come from groups who have foregone the standard III-V semiconductors in favor of other types of LEDs—like OLEDs.
“We are thinking of a different pathway for organic semiconductors,” says Chih-Jen Shih, a chemical engineer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Shih and his colleagues were interested in finding a way to fabricate small OLEDs at scale. Using an electron-beam lithography-based technique, they crafted arrays of green OLEDs with pixels as small as 100 nm across.
Where today’s best displays have 14,000 pixels per inch, these nanoLEDs—presented in an October 2025 Nature Photonics paper—can reach 100,000 pixels per inch.
Another group tried their hands with perovskites, cage-shaped materials best-known for their prowess in high-efficiency solar panels. Perovskites have recently gained traction in LEDs too. “We wanted to see what would happen if we make perovskite LEDs smaller, all the way down to the micrometer and nanometer length-scale,” says Dawei Di, engineer at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
Di’s group started with comparatively colossal perovskite LED pixels, measuring hundreds of micrometers. Then, they fabricated sequences of smaller and smaller pixels, each tinier than the last. Even after the 1 μm mark, they did not stop: 890 nm, then 440 nm, only bottoming out at 90 nm. These 90 nm red and green pixels, presented in a March 2025 Nature paper, likely represent the smallest LEDs reported to date.
Unfortunately, small size comes at a cost: Shrinking LEDs also shrinks their efficiency. Di’s group’s perovskite nanoLEDs have external quantum efficiencies—a measure of how many injected electrons are converted into photons—around 5 to 10 percent; Shih’s group’s nano-OLED arrays performed slightly better, topping 13 percent. For comparison, a typical millimeter-sized III-V LED can reach 50 to 70 percent, depending on its color.
Shih, however, is optimistic that modifying how nano-OLEDs are made can boost their efficiency. “In principle, you can achieve 30 percent, 40 percent external quantum efficiency with OLEDs, even with a smaller pixel, but it takes time to optimize the process,” Shih says.
Di thinks that researchers could take perovskite nanoLEDs to less dire efficiencies by tinkering with the material. Although his group is now focusing on the larger perovskite microLEDs, Di expects researchers will eventually reckon with nanoLEDs’ efficiency gap. If applications of smaller LEDs become appealing, “this issue could become increasingly important,” Di says.
What can you actually do with LEDs this small? Today, the push for tinier pixels largely comes from devices like smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Makers of these displays are hungry for smaller and smaller pixels in a chase for bleeding-edge picture quality with low power consumption (one reason that efficiency is important). Polar Light’s Fajerson says that smart-glass manufacturers today are already seeking 3 μm pixels.
But researchers are skeptical that VR displays will ever need pixels smaller than around 1 μm. Shrink pixels too far beyond that, and they’ll cross their light’s diffraction limit—that means they’ll become too small for the human eye to resolve. Shih’s and Di’s groups have already crossed the limit with their 100-nm and 90-nm pixels.
Very tiny LEDs may instead find use in on-chip photonics systems, allowing the likes of AI data centers to communicate with greater bandwidths than they can today. Chip manufacturing giant TSMC is already trying out microLED interconnects, and it’s easy to imagine chipmakers turning to even smaller LEDs in the future.
But the tiniest nanoLEDs may have even more exotic applications, because they’re smaller than the wavelengths of their light. “From a process point of view, you are making a new component that was not possible in the past,” Shih says.
For example, Shih’s group showed their nano-OLEDs could form a metasurface—a structure that uses its pixels’ nano-sizes to control how each pixel interacts with its neighbors. One day, similar devices could focus nanoLED light into laser-like beams or create holographic 3D nanoLED displays.