Blue LED Wins 2014 Nobel Physics Prize

[Scordatura]

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2014/press.html

This year’s Nobel Laureates are rewarded for having invented a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source – the blue light-emitting diode (LED). In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources.

I just wanted to give a nod to professors Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for creating the first blue LED light.

I love blue LEDs, albeit because of the the eye candy impact of a pure blue light. I'm still not enthralled with current LED white lights for general household use, partly because, like CFLs, even the more yellow-tinted ones (“warm” or “soft white") don't compare favorably IMO to incandescent bulbs in color.

OTOH, I've replaced many incandescent bulbs in my house with CFLs and some LEDs over the past few years and have seen a considerable reduction in my electric bill so I guess it comes down to priorities.

For specialty lighting though, you can't beat LEDs. I do up my house and yard for Halloween and pretty much all of the lights are LED. I have solid colors, Uvs and color-changing bulbs inside and out - it's really pretty! I also have some battery string lights with timers and haven't had to put fresh batteries in for the last couple of Halloweens, so about 60 days of constant use so far. They're also great for landscape and path lighting.

I just wish there was a way to incorporate more glowy warmth into LED for household lighting. They kind of suck for reading.

 

[casebro]

I thought the first thing to do with them would be to mix the various colors to get a natural hue. Like mostly whites and a few red and blue on a corn cob.

 

[Scordatura]

Yeah, that was the big breakthrough. A couple years back I bought some corncobs, intending to install them in a couple of places where I wanted light 24/7 and in a ceiling fixture in my front entry hall. I was disappointed for the most part. I ended up using 9 watt CFLs instead and got better results.

I thought the light throw would be omnidirectional and it kinda was but in my chandelier style fixture the area underneath it wasn't bright enough to be practical, and that was with five bulbs. The color temperature of the CFLs aren't perfect compared to incandescent bulbs but it serves the purpose and use a lot less wattage than five 40 watt bulbs.

Blue LEDs are the foundation for so many energy-efficient applications – the list is mind boggling. Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura deserve the prize for their contributions. While white LEDs for household use still fall short for my purposes, each generation gets closer to what I'm looking for so I'm confident that I'll be using them more and more in the future.

 

[The Man]

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2014/press.html


I just wanted to give a nod to professors Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for creating the first blue LED light.

I love blue LEDs, albeit because of the the eye candy impact of a pure blue light. I'm still not enthralled with current LED white lights for general household use, partly because, like CFLs, even the more yellow-tinted ones (“warm” or “soft white") don't compare favorably IMO to incandescent bulbs in color.

OTOH, I've replaced many incandescent bulbs in my house with CFLs and some LEDs over the past few years and have seen a considerable reduction in my electric bill so I guess it comes down to priorities.

For specialty lighting though, you can't beat LEDs. I do up my house and yard for Halloween and pretty much all of the lights are LED. I have solid colors, Uvs and color-changing bulbs inside and out - it's really pretty! I also have some battery string lights with timers and haven't had to put fresh batteries in for the last couple of Halloweens, so about 60 days of constant use so far. They're also great for landscape and path lighting.

I just wish there was a way to incorporate more glowy warmth into LED for household lighting. They kind of suck for reading.

That should make my black-light posters really stand out.

 

[Scordatura]

You betcha! There's something really cool about things that glow under Uv light.

I have a couple of early LED cool white strings that are so blue/white that a Uv reactive object within five inches or so will glow. I sort of understand why that is – I think it has something to do with the phosphor coatings - but I'm not sure.

 

[ferd burfle]

Use care, blue and royal blue LEDs and some white lamps based on UV/blue LEDs carry an eye safety warning. Presumable these aren't used in consumer products without glass or plastic to screen out the UV.

ferd

 

[casebro]

Is there so much UV that we can save electricity in our tanning booths too?

 

[stevea]

Tho' high intensity blue & white LEDs are of great practical importance, it's really not comparable to the subjects of most Nobel prizes n physics.

 

[Olowkow]

I have a keyboard that will illuminate the keys in blue, red, or purple which is very useful when you are typing in the dark. But just having blue LEDs is not just for this type of application.

The blue LED is a major innovation. It really is a big deal. It permits LED's to replace incandescents in many white light applications which will save huge amounts of power and permit low power illumination where it was impossible previously, without burning fossil fuels. The blue LED permits full color viewing of LCD screens, which are hugely more efficient than the old CRT TVs or computer monitors. LEDs replacement of filament type bulbs cuts costs of not only replacement, but of the labor to replace and their reliabilitly greatly enhances the safety of situations where light is crucial. I was recently at a lecture in a large physics lecture hall, and the speaker pointed out that all the bulbs in the ceiling, hundreds, had been replaced last year, and no one was told about the replacement. He said that people are still arguing whether it would be a good idea, since the lighting would not be as good. According to him no one has ever said they noticed the new bulbs.

UV LEDs are being used for biomedical research, and their use has already proven invaluable to chemists and medical research scientists. UV LEDs and lasers would be impossible without over 30 years of development that it took to get a workable blue emitting diode.

 

[macdoc]

Tho' high intensity blue & white LEDs are of great practical importance, it's really not comparable to the subjects of most Nobel prizes n physics.

Sorry but when all the majors could not even build one gallium LED ( and they tried cuz it was the holy grail )

and one scientist labours for 20 years with limited resources in an obscure chemical company to bring it to fruition....I'd rank that the greater achievement.

What his invention will do both for individuals and the planetary biome is nearly unparalleled except for maybe the laser and the microchip.

Good cover here

As well as being a technological marvel, Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura’s Nobel Prize is a testament to tenacity in experimental science. As much as deft theoretical insight, the development of blue LEDs required hours of trial and error in the lab, performing the same procedures under subtly different conditions, trying to maximise the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of this finicky process.

The result is a technology which is all around us in the developed world, and making headway into the developing world too.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/your-phone-screen-just-won-the-nobel-prize-in-physics/

 

[elgarak]

Use care, blue and royal blue LEDs and some white lamps based on UV/blue LEDs carry an eye safety warning. Presumable these aren't used in consumer products without glass or plastic to screen out the UV.

ferd

They do carry an eye safety warning here in Europe, in particular flashlights that might turn up as toys in children's hands. Frankly, I call all of it bollocks. I have read the papers the warnings are based on, and the danger is not measurably different from other high-intensity lamps. It's the brightness, not the spectrum, that carries the danger. Doesn't matter how the high brightness is achieved.

The second part of your post is completely wrong, though. The requirement for a UB absorbent screen (usually glass) is for certain types of incandescent halogen light bulbs that do emit a measurable amount of deep UV light. By contrast, there are no LEDs used for white light that use deep UV -- their all blue or scratch the UV around 400 nm. It's simply too expensive and not efficient to use higher energy non-visible light to produce white light across the visible spectrum. Therefore, there's no requirement that I know of for a UV filter. There's a EU rule for labeling and warnings that lumps LEDs together with laser diodes. I consider this rule to be complete bureaucratic ******** without scientific base. Sorry about the harsh language, but that's what it is.

There are some LEDs that do go deeper into UV, but they're expensive and used as specialty light, like ALS (Alternate Light Sources) for forensics, or curing epoxy.

 

[RedPillNeo]

I just love the beautiful near monochrome colors of LEDs, and blue is one of my favorites. The service these bring to mankind, especially the energy savings, make this a Nobel-worthy discovery.

I remember being so thrilled when I read of the invention in Wired magazine in an article titled, "True Boo-Roo." WIRED article

Much was spent trying to make blue diodes from zinc selenide; their functional lifespan was measurable in minutes. Nakamura pursued a strategy others had written off- involving a positive doped gallium nitride.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Blue LEDs have been around for ages. How come they're just getting the prize now?

 

[Olowkow]

Blue LEDs have been around for ages. How come they're just getting the prize now?

Sometimes it takes a long time for an invention be be really ready for prime time.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/geek-life/history/rcas-forgotten-work-on-the-blue-led
Maruska is happy to see his story getting a fresh look again, and there’s no hard feelings on who the Nobel Prize went to. “These three guys really deserve the credit,” he says. “It’s like I say to people: they had been working on the steam engine for 100 years, but they never could make one that really worked, until James Watt showed up. It’s the guy who makes it really work who deserves the Nobel Prize. They certainly deserve it.”

 

[macdoc]

It took him 20 years against all odds and advice...

The first high-brightness blue LED was demonstrated by Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Corporation in 1994 and was based on InGaN.[33] Its development built on critical developments in GaN nucleation on sapphire substrates and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN, developed by Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano in Nagoya.[ci

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#The_blue_and_white_LED

LEDs have been around a long time....blue was unobtanium unless this guy persisted

 

[Ron Swanson]

I haver CFL virtually everywhere I replaced than as incandescent burnt out .. one exception is a "Magic" incandescent Bulb in our back door fixture (it's never been replaced in 20 years

In the attic storage I changed all 5 bulbs to expensive LED's because they are low heat and incandescent melted a rubber maid bin once and scared the crap out of me

 

[Hawk one]

Blue LEDs have been around for ages. How come they're just getting the prize now?

It is not at all unusual for these kinds of prizes to be awarded a fair amount of time after the discovery/invention, and the main reason for this is that it will generally take at least a decade (and maybe two) to do all of the following:

a) Figure out just how good the breakthrough is in itself (Does it work as advertised? How hard was it to figure out? How much of an improvement is it?)
b) Figure out what the breakthrough means for the relevant science/engineering field
c) Figure out what the breakthrough means for society in general.

It is in fact pretty rare that you can answer all those three questions within ten years, much less one.

 

[elgarak]

It took him 20 years against all odds and advice...

...to get the Nobel prize, not to get blue LEDs. Blue LEDs popped up on the market in 1998 or thereabouts, with 'white' ones not long after that ('white', as in blue LEDs with a phosphor. They were still terribly dim and awfully blue. To get the phosphor right took another couple of years, in fact is still ongoing. I bought my first LED keychain light around that time.)

 

[Zax63]

I always liked this part of Shuji Nakamura's story. The company he worked for awarded him a bonus of around $200 for an invention that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them. He quit and sued and ended up with around $8 million according to the linked article.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

LEDs have been around a long time....blue was unobtanium unless this guy persisted

Blue has been around for a long time. I've changed many a blue LED in both stage lighting and DJ equipment, so I can say with confidence that they've been around for a fair while now.

It is not at all unusual for these kinds of prizes to be awarded a fair amount of time after the discovery/invention, and the main reason for this is that it will generally take at least a decade (and maybe two) to do all of the following:

a) Figure out just how good the breakthrough is in itself (Does it work as advertised? How hard was it to figure out? How much of an improvement is it?)
b) Figure out what the breakthrough means for the relevant science/engineering field
c) Figure out what the breakthrough means for society in general.

It is in fact pretty rare that you can answer all those three questions within ten years, much less one.

That makes sense, thanks.