Computer Monitors : Plasma Monitors

Plasma Monitors

Plasma technology is another technology used in display devices. The basic idea behind the plasma technology is to

illuminate tiny colored fluorescent lights to create image pixels. Each pixel is made of three such fluorescent lights – red, green and blue lights. To create a wide range of colors, intensity of these lights is varied accordingly.

The heart of plasma displays is plasma which is basically a gas (generally Xenon and Neon) made up of free flowing electrons and ions. When the electrical current flows through the plasma, negatively charged particles move towards the positively charged area of the plasma and vice versa. This makes collisions which resultantly excite the gas atoms in the plasma and then release the energy as photons of light.

There are millions of tiny cells filled with the gas like xenon and neon. They are positioned between two plates of glass known as front plate glass and rear plate glass. Two transparent electrodes covered by an insulating dielectric material and a magnesium oxide protective layer are also sandwiched between the glass plates on both sides of the cells on the entire screen.

When the CPU sends the signals to the Plasma monitor, the corresponding electrodes are charged which ionizes the gas in the intersecting cells by passing an electric current. Due to the collisions between the gas ions they release energy in the form of the photons of light which illuminate the respective cells. This process occurs thousands of times in a small fraction of second making the display faster. The released ultraviolet photons strike the phosphor material coated on the inner wall of the cell and hence phosphor electrons jump to the higher energy level. When the electron falls back to its normal state, it releases the energy as a visible light photon. Every pixel on the screen is made of three different colored phosphors – red, green and blue.