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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.
But I'm ok with that.
But they are much closer. You can get them under $10.00 now. Because of their long life, and low energy usage. That means you are saving overall.
If we could get our homes switched to DC, then we could have these without the extra electronics in them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've spent many a joyful hour gazing at the blue LED. My little blue pals.
It is a pity that their work inspired one of the most horrible trends in consumer electronics design... Seriously, the power light, on the front of the TV, where I'll be staring directly into it while trying to watch something?
Blue is pretty much necessary for LED illumination that doesn't look like some sort of emergency-power-failsafe-lighting scene; but damn is it ever overused...
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.
Blue LEDs exist, but true "white LEDs" do not. So-called "white LEDs" are blue LEDs with a phosphor over them. They're little more efficient at making "white" light than CFLs.
Red and blue LED light are great for plants, but human eyes are most sensitive to the middle of the visual spectrum, peaking around green. And unfortunately there's still no technology that produces an efficient green LED. That is what is really waiting for a prize. Such an invention could eliminate somewhere in the ballpark of 5% of human energy consumption.
Beautiful Blueberries
because some designers decided blue is the new green - the future is blue so let's make our product futuristic. Bah. Very overused.
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.
You don't get it: inciting impotent rage is a *feature*. When you feel rage, everything becomes clear. That's *so* much more satisfying than gnawing, existential doubt.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"CREE is selling 60w bulbs for $9"
Wow, a 60w LED bulb - how many lumens does that put out?
Feit electric has a similar 60W bulb for about $9 and it puts out 850 lumens. I bought a pile of them at Costco. With a $6 per bulb local utility company subsidy (Connecticut) they were $3 apiece. I like the color temperature a lot. I should have bought more. Also- I have been using 1 to 2 bulb "Y" adapters in any fixture where they will fit. Since LED's use so little power, there is no worry at all about exceeding the amperage limit of the wiring. Let it be bright!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
You mean a LCD screen? The LEDs are the backlight.
It's the first Nobel for a Blue Light Special!
Yes, we do have true white LEDs. The problem is the efficiency isn't up there, and it's based on a new nano-material (I can't remember if it was selenium or tungsten-based.)
We've got remote phosphor tech that works great for producing green - otherwise Cree wouldn't be hitting 300+ lumens per watt (given the lumen is weighted at 550-555nm green)
Also, green light is great for plants. Don't let old science fool you. Why do you think an HPS lamp works so well despite about 80% of its visible light output being green and yellow?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've seen alarm clocks that supposedly have blue LEDs; I will never buy one.
Given that blue light has the strongest disruptive effect on circadian rhythm (no idea whether it's just because blue photons are relatively energetic, or whether we evolved to respond strongly to lights that look rather like the sky during the day, I have no idea; but that's what the research says), you'll really start to need the alarm function after a few nights trying to sleep with one of those....
We have the lowest concentration of blue sensitive photoreceptors in the fovea centralis, so reading blue lights (or things lit with blue light) is relatively difficult. Indeed, the localization of blue point sources is difficult, making bright blue LEDs look hazy and indistinct even while being blinding.
I can't wait for this trend to end either. I hope my green VFD and LCD alarm clocks hold out. So soothing and easily readable.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Several, if they are the old style little vibrating football games.
Seriously, LEDs already light an NFL venue in Arizona:
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/06682dfa85e44ab0a98f44001249ea09/sunday-night-lights-super-bowl-be-lit-leds
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Obviously, he meant equivalent lumens to a 60W incandescent.
Fortunately, LED manufacturers seem to be more honest about these ratings. With CFLs, besides their other problems the manufacturers were calling 600 lumen bulbs "60W equivalent". Maybe a 130V rough service soft white that's blackened by a year of use!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
Do you have a particular seller to recommend? I've been slowly replacing the bulbs in my house with LED ones instead, buying on the low end of the price range in brick & mortar stores. For some reason, I still trust Amazon far more than I do eBay when it comes to dealing with errors or disappointing products, but a lot of cool things are on eBay and not Amazon.
So: do you have favoritess? Model numbers to search for?
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
LEDs are practically by definition monochromatic. They are pn junction diodes. The energy of the photons (aka color) corresponds to the bandgap, and are thus monochromatic. So I'd like to see what you're talking about.
Cree's lab demonstration is not a commercial product; lab demonstrations of all techs are way ahead of commercial realities. Many things you do in the lab simply *can't* be done in the real world at any price. For example, you could gain a couple percent efficiency on metal halide lights by omitting the UV shield, but then you'd be causing permanent vision damage to your consumers. Cree's best commercial LED is 200 lumens per watt, the XLamp XP-L. And FYI, Cree's lab announcement was said to both be "single LED" and "white", which means phosphor, not multiple LEDs of different wavelengths.
As far as I'm aware, the most efficient green LED today yield around 100 if driven nominally, up to around 130-140 if underdriven and well cooled. That's not a figure you'd get in an actual lamp, nor would you use such expensive LEDs in commercial lighting solutions anyway.
LED lightbulbs may very well someday well exceed CFLs. But that day is not today.
No, green light is not great for plants, and I don't know where you got this idea or that it's "old science". There's countless modern peer-reviewed research to support it. The reason plants appear green is because chlorophyl reflects green light. The fact that leaves look black under red or blue LED light is a very good thing. You usually get 2-3 times higher growth per input watt on LED compared to HID, including HPS. HPS has little green, it's mostly yellow, with green and red as the next biggest components. And the worst type of light that exists for growing plants is LPS, which is virtually all yellow. The effect of LPS on plants is terrible.
Yes, the long-term standard for commercial greenhouse light supplementation has been HID, but that's been changing as LEDs drop in price. I know the founder of a company that started a company that produces greens in stackable self-contained "farms". They evaluated different light sources and found that LED gives by far the best bang for their buck. They're hardly the only ones, there's lots of companies switching over.
Side note: I raise a large number of tropicals in Iceland under supplimental lighting.
Beautiful Blueberries
There's about 1 blue receptor to every 60 of the others.
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.
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.
Also, green light is great for plants. Don't let old science fool you. Why do you think an HPS lamp works so well despite about 80% of its visible light output being green and yellow?
When I GIS "photosynthesis spectrum", I see a million different curves, but they all peak in red and violet-through-blue-green. Even if you don't look at emission and absorption curves, just look at a plant. Its leaves are green. That means that it's reflecting more green light relative to other colors. That should be a clue that green light isn't the most efficient choice for feeding plants. (It's not conclusive, of course; nature's paths aren't always optimized for efficiency.)
Why do HPS lamps work so well? I don't know, but here are some possibilities:
They're many times more efficient than incandescent grow lamps, so you get more usable light per watt even if its spectrum isn't ideal.
HPS grow lamps are tweaked to produce more red light.
HPS lamps put out a huge total radiant flux, so they're just brighter than alternatives, in both useful and wasteful wavelengths.
Can you provide some supporting evidence that "green light is great for plants", when it's near the bottom of the photosynthetic absorption spectrum?
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.
That's not the reason for the eyestrain, though.
Blue light actually triggers/worsens macular degeneration. It's such a high-energy photon that it causes physical damage. Long-suspected, recently experimentally confirmed by researchers in Spain.
This is why all of my monochromatic blue/red LED panels come with an eye hazard warning and always have. As soon as you go past sun levels of luminous flux in the blue range, you start hitting levels of retinal damage from photon overexposure in the blue wavelengths.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, that's an announcement for a project to try to invent a way to make one. An announcement most notably short on the "how" aspect.
Any particular reason you linked back to this very article yet gave it a different title that only appears on the internet in your comment?
Beautiful Blueberries
My alarm clock had a blue hue, even on the dimmest setting it was enough to illuminate the room after a few minutes when my eyes adjusted to the low light level.
Maybe instead of being a terror, my cat was actually trying to give me a better night's sleep by chewing through the cord rendering it useless.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Unlikely to happen as it would cost more.
Low voltage DC throughout the home would mean high-currents are required - take say, a 12W LED bulb. If you wanted to run it direct, that would mean around 3V at 4A. Wire 4 up in parallel and that's 16A, which means your cabling in the house is just as thick as it is now. Get 10 bulbs and that's 40A, which requires jumper-cable style thickness of wires.
Wire thickness dictates its ampacity (how much current can be carried for a given temperature rise).
It's cheaper to actually run a higher voltage and use a converter to the lower voltage you need because you're not carrying as much current so you can use thinner cables (cheaper, easier to install) and potentially more efficient because of IIR losses (which goes up with the square of the current).
And the award for misinterpreting research goes to...
Did you actually read the paper? It's about the benefit of adding different kinds of light in strong white light and finds that green helps most in such a situation because the oversaturation of the outer chloroplasts from red and blue light. There are, of course, countless papers out there that show the main actually tested usage of light is poorer for green, including research that cites that paper (the one I linked found that in some circumstances giving more green light can actually decrease growth - so hey if you like burning more energy to decrease your plants growth...)
Beautiful Blueberries
My external disk has a blue power LED. While covered with duct tape, it's still visible.
Yep.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Any particular reason you linked back to this very article
He just messed up and made the link relative.
Green Light Drives Leaf Photosynthesis More Efficiently than Red Light in Strong White Light: Revisiting the Enigmatic Question of Why Leaves are Green
IANAB, but I think the crux of this article is on the phrase "in strong white light".
Because green light can penetrate further into the leaf than red or blue light, in strong white light,
any additional green light absorbed by the lower chloroplasts would increase leaf photosynthesis to a
greater extent than would additional red or blue light.
So perhaps green light is more effective outdoors, but in an environment only lit by artificial light, green light is probably not the most effective (unless maybe you use both a powerful white light AND a green light?).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Who diagnosis a DVD player these days beyond "it's broke, have another". Certainly not something a consumer would be doing.
And anyone stupid enough to need a light to tell them a device isn't plugged in deserves to pay for a service call.
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.
That said, maybe pot is different. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet doing non-commercial indoor plant growing under artificial lights that's *not* pot ;)
Beautiful Blueberries
Utilize red/green instead of blue/green.
http://www.thinkspain.com/news...
The University and Professor are named in the article. Finding the study itself shouldn't be too difficult, I can't find it this moment as I'm at work.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.