2014 Nobel Prize In Physics Awarded To the Inventors of the Blue LED posting says that the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of the blue LED. When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Before them the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. Blue LED technology is basis of modern white LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient: The most recent record is just over 300 lm/W, which can be compared to 16 for regular light bulbs and close to 70 for fluorescent lamps.
This is not the first price they get on this. Shuji Nakamura was awarded 2006 Millennium Technology Prize on for his invention of revolutionary new light sources: blue, green, and white light-emitting diodes and the blue laser diode.
14 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
This is also interesting:
Trio share 2014 Nobel Prize for cracking internal GPS of the brain
Neuro space, the final frontier
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/07/trio_share_2014_nobel_prize_for_mapping_out_the_brains_internal_gps_system/
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three neurologists for their work in helping to understand how the brain can remember where we are – and finding out which nerve cells are responsible.
“This year’s Nobel Laureates have discovered a positioning system, an ‘inner GPS’ in the brain that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space, demonstrating a cellular basis for higher cognitive function,” said the Nobel Prize committee in a statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blue LED Inventors Win Nobel Prize
$1.1 million shared among three Japanese researchers
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324224&
Their invention paved the way for today’s white LED, which has obsoleted both incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.
Few Nobel laureates get to see the effects of their inventions on worldwide quality of life.
“What’s really special here, of course, is that this discovery has already changed our quality of life [and] prevented some power plants from needing to be built, because of the low power of LED lamps,” Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, told us. “Also, society is finally appreciating them for their real-world benefits, and that is something very few Nobel laureates can claim to in their lifetime.”
For people worldwide who do not live on an energy grid, LED lamps are already improving quality of life, since their low power requirements make them the cheapest form of illumination. They can easily be powered by the energy collected during the day from cheap Chinese photovoltaic panels.
Even though Marconi Labs in Britain reported a green light emission from a crystal of silicon carbide and a cat’s whisker in 1907, it was not until 1927 that the Russian scientist Oleg Losev reported the first true LED. However, it remained a solution looking for a problem until Texas Instruments patented a gallium arsenide (GaAs) “semiconductor radiant diode,” the first commercial LED emitting in the infrared range.
By 1976, there was a growing industry using LEDs for communications and later as small indicator lights.
The blue LED was the last piece to the puzzle of using LEDs for lighting, since you need all three colors (R-G-B) to make a white LED.
first reported high-brightness blue LED was announced by Shuji Nakamura while working at Nichia Corp. in 1994 using indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs).
a variety of phosphors that, when combined with the blue LEDs, produce different tints of white LEDs — normally called “warm” (yellowish) or “cold” (blueish).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Optics is involved in another Nobel:
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for three – a revolutionary discovery was born in Turku, Finland
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry are Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell, and William E. Moerner, who have developed a high-precision microscopy.
- Their pioneering work has brought high-resolution microscopy of nano-dimension, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its explanatory memorandum.
The expectation was for a long time that the wavelength of light to set a limit on how accurate microscopy could develop. Chemistry award is given to researchers in the realization that the restriction can be circumvented by the use of fluorescent molecules.
Award-winning Hell was 1990s a researcher at the University of Turku and did there the inventions mentioned by the Nobel Prize Committee.
Source: http://www.iltasanomat.fi/tiede/art-1288748275513.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
White LED lies: It’s great, but Nobel physics prize-winning great?
How artificial lighting could offer an artificial promise
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/11/has_the_nobel_physics_committee_got_this_years_prize_right/
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to the three Japanese guys who worked on, and got right, the blue LED. It’s an excellent piece of work, enabling a whole new ensemble of energy efficient lamps and colour LED screens, and fully deserving of the prize. And yes, it might well change society in wondrous and wonderful ways.
However, I’m not entirely certain that the Nobel Committee has got it quite right in assuming what those changes might be. What they say will happen could happen, true.
The actual work itself involved (stripped of all that technical stuff of interest to you lot) working out how to grow gallium nitride. This enables blue LEDs to be produced
But, before we go there, we should point out that whatever happens in the world of lighting, gallium nitride has already changed our world.
It’s the basis of the higher density we can now achieve in optical storage. That same gallium nitride is what is used to make the blue lasers which allow us to get past the information density limits seen with the red lasers used in CDs and DVDs. Blu-ray is so called for a very good reason: it’s using those gallium nitride lasers to both read and write the information to a density that just isn’t possible with the red (longer) light wavelengths.
Which brings us to the subject of lighting: strangely, the first place that these blue bulbs started to make a difference was in railway signalling.
That LEDs use less power to produce more lumens is true. But that doesn’t actually mean that people will then use these new bulbs to consume less electricity. For what we don’t actually know is the electrical price of lumens? How much will our behaviour change, and how much will our desire to light up our surroundings change when the price alters? This is, of course, the province of dismal science, not of physicists. Which might be why a committee of physicists didn’t consider this point.
Other work, building on his historical examination of the price of artificial light, has looked at the consumption of artificial light (PDF) with respect to price. The answer seems to be that we humans really rather like artificial light. So much so that we’re prepared to spend 0.7 per cent of our income on it. A number that has held static over centuries.
When light gets cheaper then we just have more of it. Which, of course, means that if light gets cheaper then we might just have ever more of it, as opposed to not using the energy and having the same amount we do now.
homepage says:
I’m very happy to find this great site. I need to to thank you
for ones time for this wonderful read!! I definitely liked every part of it and I have
you saved to fav to see new information in your web site.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nobel Prize Puts Blue LEDs in Spotlight – IEEE Spectrum
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/nobel-prize-puts-blue-leds-in-spotlight
Nobel Shocker: RCA Had the First Blue LED in 1972 – IEEE Spectrum
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/geek-life/history/rcas-forgotten-work-on-the-blue-led
Tomi Engdahl says:
No Nobel for the Father of the LED
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/no-nobel-for-the-father-of-the-led
Given the Nobel Foundation’s statutes (three people at maximum, no posthumous awards), it’s almost inevitable that every year, there will be people who deserve a share of a Nobel Prize that are left out.
Nick Holonyak Jr., the person widely credited with the development of the first visible-light LED
Tomi Engdahl says:
While Blue LED inventors get Nobel Prize, father of LEDs still snubbed
Read more: http://reefbuilders.com/2014/10/10/blue-led-nobel-prize/#ixzz3G5jadb9k
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Blue LED Has Many Parents
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/optoelectronics/the-blue-led-has-many-parents
The story of science and technology today is the story of many hands. But try as we might, it’s hard to get away from the hero narrative. It’s still easy for us to get swept up by the tales of lone inventors, who battle the powers-that-be and fight against all odds to prove themselves right.
The stories that we tell about the development of the blue LED are no exception. The hero has long been Shuji Nakamura, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Nakamura, working “virtually alone” for a small, geographically remote company called Nichia Chemical Industries, was responsible for developing manufacturing processes that brought the first truly bright blue LEDs to market. He’s since become the face of the device.
The thing is, it’s hard to say if any of this would have happened without the efforts of a number of others, in particular his two fellow awardees, Isamu Akasaki and Akasaki’s former student, Hiroshi Amano.
Although Nakamura’s company was the first to begin selling blue p-n junction LEDs, they soon faced competition by a company working with Akasaki: Toyoda Gosei.
Nichia became “embroiled in a bitter patent war” with Toyoda Gosei and launched “an energetic public relations campaign” to brand Nakamura as the father of the blue LED, Lécuyer and Ueyama write.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LED Inventor Nick Holonyak Reflects on Discovery 50 Years Later
https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/led-inventor-nick-holonyak-reflects-discovery-50-years-later-0
Dubai, UAE; October 10, 2012: Fifty years ago, 33-year-old GE scientist Dr. Nick Holonyak, Jr., invented the first practical visible-spectrum light-emitting diode (LED), a device that GE colleagues at the time called “the magic one” because its light, unlike infrared lasers, was visible to the human eye.
https://www.invent.org/inductees/nick-holonyak-jr
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Holonyak
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nick-Holonyak-Jr
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M&si=nzysB_ybmsuCP5iS&fbclid=IwAR313nMrlOvpC2otvCDbdmbSk-YCcRHTGtZpGfKbS0Pq_6xLgwUpYr5xU3I
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/shuji-nakamura-the-man-who-gave-us-the-blue-led-despite-all-odds/