The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics to the team of researchers that created the first blue LEDs in the early 1990s and ultimately enabled functional white light output from LED sources.
– Isamu Akasaki from Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan and Nagoya University, Japan,
– Hiroshi Amano from Nagoya University, Japan,
– Shuji Nakamura from University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.
have been honored “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.”
Illustration of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
The Academy noted that the blue LED was crucial in creating white light by combining with existing red and green LEDs. More recently, the white light is most often generated by a blue LED along with a mix of yellow, red, and/or green phosphors in a phosphor-converted white LED.
At the system level, shipping solid-state lighting (SSL) products regularly achieve efficacy in the 150 lm/W level, 5 times less for halogen bulbs.
“With 20% of the world’s electricity used for lighting, it’s been calculated that optimal use of LED lighting could reduce this to 4%,” said Frances Saunders, president of the Institute of Physics, in response to the Nobel announcement. “Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura’s research has made this possible and this prize recognizes this contribution.”