Blue LED Wins 2014 Nobel Physics Prize

[Soapy Sam]

Blue has been around for a long time. I've changed many a blue LED in both stage lighting and DJ equipment,

Why? High failure rate?

 

[macdoc]

I guess if you are 20 years old they've been around a long time...but considering they were only invented in 1994......

Let alone in production...

 

[jasonpatterson]

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.

A corncob with a properly mixed group of LEDs can produce a very good bulb, as you suggest, but the ultimate goal is a single LED that produces good white light.

Most white LEDs use a blue LED with the addition of green/yellow and red phosphors to generate white light. The difficulty is that they have spectral dips in the cyan and violet regions that make the color look slightly unnatural (though better than fluorescent, in my opinion.)

In the past few years they've come up with violet based leds with blue, green, and red phosphors that offer a very good spectrum, comparable to sunlight.

 

[macdoc]

Originally Posted by casebro View Post
I thought the first thing to do with them would be to mix the various colors to get a natural hue

Yup - that's why they needed blue

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I guess if you are 20 years old they've been around a long time...but considering they were only invented in 1994......

Let alone in production...

I was thinking more "a long time" in comparison to the general rate of advancement of technology.

 

[elgarak]

I guess if you are 20 years old they've been around a long time...but considering they were only invented in 1994......

Let alone in production...

I was working in research on LEDs during the time blue LEDs were going from prototypes to series products. Our universe department was closely working with a company trying to come up with a workable, economically viable procedure to make them (obviously, we/they were beaten by some Japanese ), so I am very aware of a time when they were not there.

Must be getting old

(No, I was not working on blues. I did boring repetitive work to optimize manufacture of infrareds. Simply by luck. They had two openings at the time. A friend of mine got the one in the "blue" team.)