No ink required paper can be printed with light

In an effort to curb the adverse environmental impacts of paper production, researchers in a new study have developed a light-printable paper—paper that can be printed with UV light, erased by heating to 120 °C (250 °F), and rewritten more than 80 times.

The secret to printing with light lies in the color-changing chemistry of nanoparticles, a thin coating of which can be easily applied to conventional paper to transform it into the light-printable version.

Researchers have been investigating alternatives to disposable paper. One possibility is to take advantage of the color-switching ability of certain chemicals when exposed to light, although in the past this approach has faced challenges in terms of stability, limited reversibility, high cost, toxicity, and difficulty in applying the coating to ordinary porous paper.

The light-printable paper developed in the new study improves in all of these areas, bringing the technology closer to applications, which could include any medium on which information is printed and needed for only a short time.

Read more at Phys.org

Image Credit: American Chemical Society

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