PLASMA PANEL DISPLAY

For the past 75 years, the vast majority of displays have been built around the same technology: the cathode ray tube (CRT). Recently, a new alternative has popped up on store shelves: the plasma flat panel display. These displays have wide screens, comparable to the largest CRT sets, but they are only about 6 inches (15 cm) thick. Based on the information in a video signal, the display lights up thousands of tiny dots (called pixels) with a high-energy beam of electrons. In most systems, there are three pixel colors -- red, green and blue -- which are evenly distributed on the screen. By combining these colors in different proportions, the display can produce the entire color spectrum. The basic idea of a plasma display is to illuminate tiny colored fluorescent lights to form an image. Each pixel is made up of three fluorescent lights -- a red light, a green light and a blue light. Just like a CRT television, the plasma display varies the intensities of the different lights to produce a full range of colors. The central element in a fluorescent light is a plasma, a gas made up of free-flowing ions (electrically charged atoms) and electrons (negatively charged particles). Xenon and neon atoms, the atoms used in plasma screens, release light photons when they are excited. These photons are used to illuminate the pixels accordingly.