A team of Chinese researchers from Zhejiang University has unveiled the tiniest LED displays ever made—so small that they’d make a grain of sand feel bloated.

Baodan Zhao and her lab team at Zhejiang University managed to craft pixel-sized LEDs just 90 nanometres wide—that’s the size of a typical virus.

These microscopic light-beepers are so laughably tiny that not even the most powerful optical microscopes can spot them unaided. This is convenient because this level of overachievement deserves to be invisible to the naked eye.

The researchers went full sci-fi and used perovskites, a class of materials are found both in the Earth’s mantle and in futuristic solar panels. Unlike your average LED, which tends to fade faster, these perovskite-based marvels remain impressively bright, even when shrunk down to the size of a modest regret.

They even managed to put together a dainty little display—a leafy tree next to a globe—on a monochromatic screen where each pixel is narrower than a human hair. Because if you’re going to show off, you might as well do it in green glowing pinpricks only a microscope could love.

Zhao said, “Apart from our scientific curiosity, such experiments demonstrate that at extremely small sizes, perovskite LEDs can still maintain reasonable efficiencies.”

Translation: “We made them stupidly small, and they still work.”

That’s bad news for conventional LEDs, which start wheezing and collapsing when you try to miniaturise them beyond a certain point. But the perovskites are just getting started.