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Display and power are two essential building blocks to support the development of modern electronics. As an industry standard, displays (such as liquid crystal displays or organic light emitting displays) powered by batteries provide a convenient information channel for users. Energy consumption of displays accounts for a large proportion of total energy consumptions of the electronics, such as more than 30% for smartphones. Displays and batteries both have evidenced preceding advancements in the past centuries, independently. For next generation displays, reaching higher resolution and lower power consumption (<10 mW cm-2 for current display technologies) is urgently needed. Naturally, it is also important to realize higher energy density for the development of energy storage technologies. While displays and batteries need to work seamlessly for all the electronics, the development path of these two fields have never converged. Alkali metals are attracting significant attention at the intersect of plasmonics and batteries. On one hand, alkali metal is demonstrated to be a low-loss plasmonic material. Plasmonics, with the unique capability of focusing light into deep subwavelength scale, has long been pursued to achieve high resolution display devices. Tunable plasmonic displays have been successfully achieved by external electrical, chemical or other stimulus. On the other hand, as the lightest metal, lithium (Li) metal is regarded as the holy grail of high energy density anode materials, with the high specific capacity (3860 mAh g-1) and the lowest electrochemical potential (−3.04 V versus the standard hydrogen electrode). we demonstrate a Li metal based dynamic plasmonic color display, which is a precisely-designed nanostructured anode of Li metal batteries simultaneously, with therefore inherited advantages of the dynamic modulation and the extremely low energy consumption. The dynamic display is enabled by the structural plasmonic color pixels based on a Li metal battery. During the continuous and reversible electrochemical transformation, Li metal nucleates and grows on a pre-patterned substrate during the charge process, which leads to the generation and tuning of plasmonic colors. Li metal strips off from the substrate during the discharge process, thus leading to the erasure of the color. The energy storage feature of Li metal batteries can recycle energy and lead to the energy consumption as low as 1.5 mW cm-2 at the dynamic color state and even lower to 0.105 mW cm-2 at the static color state, vital for energy-efficient display technologies. More importantly, the dual functionalities of the display and power lead to self-powered displays, in which one pixel charges another pixel to release and store energy. Therefore, our results offer a unique opportunity to enable the integrated platform for energy storage and information display down to nanoscale.
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