Scientists Growing New Crystals To Make LED Lights Better

coondoggie writes "When to comes to offering warm yet visually efficient lighting, LEDs have a long way to go. But scientists with the University of Georgia and Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories are looking at new family of crystals they say glow different colors and hold the key for letting white LED light shine in homes and offices as well as natural sunlight."

Comments

Not much content in the article...

[girlinatrainingbra]

Not much content in the article... The researchers have grown nanocrystals using europium oxide and aluminum oxide powders as the source materials because the rare-earth element europium is known to have good phosphorescent properties.

A little talk about UV LEDs and fluorescent materials, but not much talk about wide-band color phosphors, or even what bare LEDs to mix to match sunlight or what all. Seriously minimal content in the pointed to article.

The group has been studying the atomic structure of the materials using x-rays from Argonne's Advanced Photon Source. Two of the three types of crystal structures in the group of phosphors had never been seen before, which can probably be attributed to the crystals' small size, Budai said.

You'd think they might actually mention what it is about the two crystal structures that has never been seen before !!! That might make it more interesting. There's not even a pointer to another web page or article that has details about this!!!! How disappointing.... editors, j'accuse! add a little substance, pick something more meaty !!!

Re:So, not an organic LED ...

[tocsy]

These LEDs don't appear to be organic at all. We (I did my master's growing inorganic semiconductor crystals) say the crystals are "grown" because they are assembled typically atomic-layer by atomic-layer.

That said, this is a pretty terrible article. It doesn't say what method of growth they used, what they SAW from the growth, or really much about their experiments at all.

Hold it right there

[rgmoore]

When to comes to offering warm yet visually efficient lighting, LEDs have a long way to go.

Stop right there. Have these people used recent LED lighting? I just upgraded some lights in my house to LEDs, and they're great. They're at least as good as the LED tubes they replaced, and that's at just over 100 lumens/watt. There are a lot of low quality LEDs out there, but the good ones are already very good indeed.