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2014 Nobel Prize In Physics Awarded To the Inventors of the Blue LED
grouchomarxist writes with word that "The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, the inventors of the blue LED." From the organization's press release:
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. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created. Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. They succeeded where everyone else had failed. Akasaki worked together with Amano at the University of Nagoya, while Nakamura was employed at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Tokushima. Their inventions were revolutionary. Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps. White LED lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. They are constantly improved, getting more efficient with higher luminous flux (measured in lumen) per unit electrical input power (measured in watt). 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. As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources. Materials consumption is also diminished as LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights. The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power.
I've spent many a joyful hour gazing at the blue LED. My little blue pals.
Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
But I'm ok with that.
I'm felling blue about this prize ...
The bulbs need to come down in price a bit yet
A couple of years ago on slashdot, there was an article about someone discovering something even better than LED for lighting. High efficiency, high CRI, the works. Something to do with nanotechnology. Anyone know what I'm talking about? It had a professor iirc, not some garage inventor. But of course it could have just been buzz laden junk.
Because it seems to have dropped off. I wonder if that's the reason this Nobel is coming so late for them? I mean, since it takes a long time to verify and what not the importance of these discoveries, but this seems it should have been a circa year 2000 Nobel at the latest, when white led products were already hitting the shelves, at least in low powered flashlights and the like.
20 years is too long.
It seems every single damn device that I purchase these days feels the need to have a blue LED or five on it. Sometimes, for no other reason than to indicate that yes, it is indeed plugged in.
There is no doubt that the blue LED is a great engineering achievement but I'm struggling to see how this really advances the science of physics.
I've lost count of times I had to cut tiny pieces of electrical tape to cover these damn useless LEDs, especially on gadets in my bedroom where I try to sleep.
LED's themselves might last for up to 100 000 hours, but the electronics powering them don't. At least not on *any* consumer grade lamps.
Shuji Nakamura already won the Millennium Technology Prize in 2006 under the same topic. I bet there have been more recent developments in science that would have deserved more a Nobel Prize in Physics. Right?
As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources.
Efficiency does not mean lower consumption. Efficiency remains a useful goal but not "to save the planet's resources". The latter can happen only if overall consumption is reduced. What will happen is that as electricity used for lighting purposes is consumed less, it will get cheaper to direct it elsewhere.
Aaaand you're probably reading this from an LED screen. Ain't that great?
If you know how photons are generated at the atomic level, it is actually very difficult to get an electrical circuit to turn into a full spectrum of all visible colors that make up white light.
Where do they get these numbers? I have a fluorescent over the kitchen sink that's been on 24/7 for about 15 years.
It's the first Nobel for a Blue Light Special!
Been waiting for this one for a while. Fully deserved.
This was a big breakthrough in condensed matter and optical physics. We learned a lot about how materials doping effects the bandgaps through the development of these GaN/InGaN diodes. The blue LEDs have also been used to build cheap 405nm solid-state lasers for quantum optics experiments without the need for frequency doublers. Nobel prizes in physics usually go to a discovering that generates a lot of follow-up research and shifts the field. Blue LEDs did that in both materials/condensed matter and optics.
They were based out of Harvard were they not. Maybe Harvard should just recruit their own people and give them the credit..
"the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources"
Incorrect. Having more energy efficient things simply allows more people to be brought into the world, who in turn use up more resources. If you really want to save resources you have to find a way to reduce the number of people on the Earth.
I'm just going to put this out there; you must be REALLY ignorant of what the blue LED has done for optics, solid-state lasers, understanding the Auger effect, crop production under artificial lighting, photobiology, understanding the circadian rhythm, and a whole slew of other things if you think this isn't worthy of a Nobel.
This invention SERIOUSLY helped humanity along.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Not inventors of the first blue LED. They'd been in existence for 20 years previous. They just weren't very bright or efficient, and they cost a lot of money.
I find it disappointing the Nobel physics website itself is incorrect. Wikipedia has some more honest reporting with cites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Ultraviolet_and_blue_LEDs
Your ignorance on the significance of blue LEDs is astounding.
As we transition to LED lighting, make sure you buy Dark Sky friendly lights. It's great that LED streetlights are hooded and point down now. We need to stop wasting money creating unnecessary light pollution just for aesthetic reasons.
I haven't seen any LEDs dying in one or two years. My oldest LED lamp is now 7 years and still excellent. (Doesn't show the kind of degradation that fluorescents often do after a couple of years.) And the cost is dropping fast. A few years ago, I bought a couple of LED bulbs for about $3 each, and they give excellent light.
The really cool thing is that they don't have to be bulbs. LED strips are popular, and can be programmed for different colours or patterns. You can have flat or other surfaces that emit light. The only real problem is that there's no good standard for it yet, so you get lots of different custom solutions with wires all over the place, but I'm sure that problem will eventually be solved, and then we'll have real SciFi lighting in our homes.
Probably not.
Has the inanimate carbon rod ever won anything?
Can you point to a place where the Nobel site is incorrect? Note that the Prize is for "efficient blue light-emitting diodes", not the first. Also if you look at this document is specifies that the work was in efficient blue LEDs and mentions earlier work on blue LEDs.
The key part of the phrase which is so often overlooked in "laws/effects/rules" such as this is "tends to." I think that LEDs replacing CFLs is one of those cases that would clearly be an exception to this rule. I'm not going to light up my house like a Christmas tree because LEDs have some efficiency gains over CFLs.
The argument that an increase in lighting efficiency would increase the demand for lighting just doesn't make sense in a society where no one is deprived of lighting because it's outside of their means. The efficiency gains of using LEDs aren't so great that my electric bill is going to significantly drop -- but they are great enough that total electricity consumption throughout the country will (which would mean less coal burned).
From the article you linked:
This argument is usually presented as a reason not to impose environmental policies, or to increase fuel efficiency (e.g. if cars are more efficient, it will simply lead to more driving).[7][8] Several points have been raised against this argument. First, in the context of a mature market such as for oil in developed countries, the direct rebound effect is usually small, and so increased fuel efficiency usually reduces resource use, other conditions remaining constant.[6][9][10] Second, even if increased efficiency does not reduce the total amount of fuel used, there remain other benefits associated with improved efficiency.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Thats about 40W incadescent bulb, the minimum many people require for evening reading. They just couldnt get a single white LED or small sets of them to work for long periods of time at this intensity. So they offered a "X Prize" and Philips won a few years ago. I've started to see some 1000 lumen LED bulbs around now.
What do you have against Android Application Packages?
Cuts power consumption 80% over alternatives. A careful recipe of light durations accelerates harvests to under two months. I saw these for about $300 at the Denver County Fair. Pays back by about third harvest of commercial herb purchase.
As long as they aren't a completely different type (like OLEDs) the LED's themselves should have no problem lasting decades. The problem with LED's in a lighting situation is the ultra compact power supply that are required to fit it into an old screw in socket. Those power supplies can be susceptible to heat/shock/etc, making their longevity an issue. These ultra compact power supplies are also most of the reason why LED bulbs cost so much. The simplest solution would be to start installing a central DC power supply & wiring in newly built homes so just the LEDs could be installed in dedicated sockets without their own separate power supplies. I think that is where things are going, some newer light fixtures come with their own power supply and you buy specialized bulbs that fit into that fixture. A universal format & voltage would be needed to take it to the next step.
"the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources" by using up that rare and toxic Gallium?
No, the simplest solution would be to realize that you can simply make an array of blue LEDs to match mains frequencies within a given engineering tolerance (since LEDs nowdays, in the blue range, have a reverse-breakdown voltage about double-triple their forward operating voltage) and act as a rectifier. Use a phosphor with emission persistence and no flicker concerns for visual lighting unless you're relying upon a shutter timing-based system like a video camera, which will only see a dimming and not flickering of the light at certain frequencies.
God I developed this a year ago and despite practically giving the knowledge away for free people are still screwing around. Do I need to patent this shit and shut the entire market out entirely?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As I understand it, our eyes can differentiate the frequencies of visible light into the colors of the rainbow, but the rainbow is a continuum frequencies. There's not just one frequency that's perceived as 'red' for instance, but rather a band of frequencies perceived as 'red'. So, does the 'white' light from these newfangled things produce one red frequency, one green, and one blue, or is there a band of frequencies, such as you get from incandescence? And if there isn't a band of frequencies, will it matter to our eyes?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Actually this comes at a interesting time for me. I am looking for an LED lamp. Basicallly something that can focus bright light on something or provide low ambient light for a work area. I found some interesting lamps ( uncluding "solar powered" lamps --Wha? ), many even poweredc by USB.
The thing is when I look at reviews I often read things like " was great for the first two/three/four months, then just died.".
No wonder microwave radiation is harmful, then. It is even higher energy than blue light.
According to Nobel's will the prize should be awarded for the "greatest benefit on mankind". Important inventions, even without scientific advances, are valid reasons to be awarded.
Currently using an inexpensive single-led backyard white light. 6 inch square solar panel. Small battery hidden somewhere inside. Stays astonishingly bright all night illuminating a rose tree (pointing a bit down, not up at the sky). Way more than enough to read by. Something to free much of the world from darkness.
Left to their own devices humans have tended to spend efficiency gains in lighting on more lighting.
The EU has pushed moderately hard to reverse this trend. Energy efficiency rating letters do NOT indicate physical efficiency, instead they assume that there is a specific desired outcome and the physical efficiency is only a means to an end. I have two small lamps (both LEDs it happens) with their full documentation in front of me. The EU system rates one an A+ and the other only A. The A rated LED lamp consumes 7W of electrical power and outputs 400 lumens of light, while the A+ rated lamp consumes 4W of electrical power and outputs 200 lumens. On a purely physical basis the 4W lamp is less efficient, so why the better A+ rating?
Because in practice very often if I replace a 35W halogen lamp I could choose one of these lamps. The EU wants to encourage me to use the lower powered version, even though it will be dimmer, if in fact it will still be bright enough for my application. If I only really needed 200 lumens of light, the extra 200 lumens I didn't need is not "more efficient" as the physical ratio would imply, but actually less efficient, hence the lower A rating.
When you buy an LED replacement light, you get not just LED's but a power converter that reduces voltage from 120 volts. The converter is nearly identical to the power converter in those compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFL), except for the output voltage, and which only seem to last for months instead of the years the manufacturers claim. Actually, the fluorescent bulbs do last for years, it's the power converter that fails long before the bulbs, and we're going to see the same thing in LED's. While the LEDs will last a decade or more, the power supplies will not, and being an integral part of the entire light, you'll have no choice but to throw it away and get a new one even though the most expensive parts, the LED's, are still good. Long term, even with the higher electricity consumption of incandescents, the overall combined price is still lower for incandescents plus electricity than LED's or CFL's plus electricity. All because the manufacturers use cheap power converters that don't last.
The answer is to build homes with power converters that provide the correct voltage to lighting circuits. But that's going to be a long, long time coming.
I have to say just on first blush, blue LED is not "Nobel worthy" (given that the Nobel prize is now a political circus, I'm not sure it's worth much anyways).
blue LED has done for optics, solid-state lasers, understanding the Auger effect, crop production under artificial lighting, photobiology, understanding the circadian rhythm, and a whole slew of other things if you think this isn't worthy of a Nobel.
The fact of the matter is that red, green....LED have contributed to all those fields as well.
Shouldn't the Nobel committee get its timeline straight and award the inventors of those other color LEDs before this Japanese team?
I'm yet to see a regular indicator LED on a piece of electrical equipment last 100,000 hours, let alone the poor tortured souls of LEDs forced into slave labour as room lighting.
Do it!
These people are not inventors of the blue LED. This specific kind of blue LED was invented in Soviet Union in the 1960's by the team of Zhores I. Alferov (the winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics). Nobody disputes the priority on the invention itself.
After that the issue was to develop the manufacturing process that would make the mass-production of such blue LEDs feasible. The Japanese team did exactly that: they came up with the technology that allows one to mass-manufacture the Alferov's device cheaply.
I am interested in this too. I have seen both LED bulbs and strips die, both with the same failure mode - a low-intensity flicker. In the former case I'm almost certain it's the ballast (cheap chinese capacitors), but I have no idea how the strip that takes 12V would fail assuming it's not being over-driven.
The diode junctions should last for many thousands of hours if driven with the correct current.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
the most annoyingly obnoxious led color of them all... and device manufacturers absolutely love them because they're bright and trendy... but users.. omfg.. NO. they are horrible!
we have an lcd monitor that has, of all things, a fucking bright as hell blue power led front and center (right below the panel).. and not a small one either, but nearly a full square inch in size (it is also the power button). needless to say, it has had a triple layer of sticky notes stuck over the top of it since day one... a set of satellite speakers with uber bright blue led power.. so bright it distracts from the display they sit next to --- ugly gray duct tape over that fucker. we've also had laptops with multiple super bright led lights along the front bezels (keyboard and/or display).. absolutely horrible to use, even in full ambient lighting conditions... worst fucking design choice ever, perhaps even above the equally horrible super glossy finish everything has these days (shiny piano black fingerprint magnet plastic and mirror like glossy display panels)
Wasn't there a Slashdot article a little while ago about bulbs being regulated so they never lasted longer than some specific number of hours or that company would get a fine? How does that work out?
Great, now you got a deeper meaning to this song: Adolphson & Falk - Flashing Blue https://www.youtube.com/watch?... :-) /Eric
DId you read the fucking press release? Did it mention any of that other shit? NO.
It was all about political happy "green" talk.
Can we sing Kumbaya now?
If blue LED's were the first LED made, I would not object. But which was a bigger first? Blue LEDs or
wikimedia
So my point again - this was a dreadful choice of Nobel prize. And just because something was hard to do and took a technological breakthrough to do is not reason for a Nobel prize. If it were, we could give them out like candy.
My Caddy has what many newer cars have for headlamps - leds. Damn things burn out the ballast, or lamp. Car isn't that old. My 2000 chevy's laps lasted for about 12 years. Even then the plastic was frosted over, the lamps still worked. Even if they didn't, less than $50 at any auto shop and about a minute to replace it. The caddy and the Beamer - what a PIA to get to! Expensive! Ballast for them are around $500 a pop. Headlamp assembly around $800, then you have to get it installed.
Yea, progress.
My experience is that the lights are fine, but the cheap wall wart power supply is what is actually dead. My guess is that they tend to get a power supply that is rated just high enough to run the lamp, and unlike most things that use a wall wart the light is going to be drawing the full amount of power any time it is on. Find a working power supply at the right voltage (most use 5 or 12V which is luckily common) that preferably has a higher amperage rating and you can usually revive these lights.
reading the comments written by most people i wonder how many of them actualy read the whole article ? due to the massproduction of blue LED's it became possible to make white leds !! thus saving a lot of electrisity ! before that blue due to its expense of production was used only in medical devices and needless to say military apps . i also feel that the people complaining about blues being overused , while true , has nothing to do with the overall achievement !!! lets face it why blame the people who made it possible for the way the invention is missused . on the subject of missuse the people making rediculus large and loud speakers that some idiots must have in their cars , making it almost impossible ( when the car next to you has them crancked up so high ) that normal people can not make use of their ears in traffic . i blame the people who have these things in the cars for deafening me , not the people who invented them , or even the manufacterer , cos once the item is sold , it is out of their control !
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL