The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced yesterday that the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to Japanese scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Japanese-American scientist Shuji Nakamura for their invention of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which brought new energy-saving light sources.
This is a process of waiting for the birth of the lamp: after oil lamps, incandescent lamps, and fluorescent lamps, for 30 years, the research and practice of three scientists have brought to mankind LED lamps with high lighting efficiency, long life, and the ability to produce seven-color light. Let mankind enter the LED era in the 21st century.
Create a new path that others have not taken
Their award does not lie in their theoretical breakthroughs, but in their breakthroughs in materials technology and device preparation. In fact, many scientists know about gallium nitride. In physics, there are a lot of theoretical and experimental results on the energy band structure, PN conductivity type control and luminescence characteristics of this material. What is really troublesome is that in order to realize the deviceization of this material, the substrate material and the gallium nitride lattice must be matched. At that time, many scientists followed the trend to develop new semiconductor materials.
But Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura took a different path that others did not take. The research direction of Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano is to develop materials in LED lighting systems. After thousands of experiments, they found that gallium nitride performs very well on blue LED light sources and can be used to manufacture blue LED light sources. No one has been able to use gallium nitride crystals to create high-quality LED light sources before. Nichia's Shuji Nakamura also chose gallium nitride crystals to replace zinc selenide as the basic material for blue LED light sources, and ultimately successfully produced high-quality gallium nitride.
Humanity enters the LED era
Blue light-emitting diodes are an environmentally friendly light source. Japanese scientists believe that the 21st century is the world of LED lights, while the 20th century belongs to incandescent light bulbs. In the past half century or so, red and green light-emitting diodes have been widely used in developed countries and regions such as North America, but blue light-emitting diodes are a truly revolutionary lighting technology.
According to experts, the luminous efficiency of incandescent lamps is relatively low, only 16 lumens/watt, which obviously takes up 1 watt of electricity, and the luminous brightness is not enough; while the luminous efficiency of fluorescent lamps is about 70 lumens/watt, which seems to be much higher, but the chemicals used in fluorescent lamps contain mercury, which is toxic and unstable;
Compared with these previous lamp types, LED has made a great contribution to saving earth resources. Like the white light emitted by white light diodes, the recent record is just over 300 lumens/watt. The key is that it is also very stable and has a long life. The service life of LEDs can reach 100,000 hours - while incandescent lamps can only be used for 1,000 hours and fluorescent lamps can be used for 10,000 hours - the consumption of lighting materials is also saved.
Nearly a quarter of the world's electricity consumption is used for lighting. If all high-efficiency and energy-saving LED lights are used, the earth's resources can be saved, and the feedback to the economic benefits will be very obvious.
Light source manufacturing enters the "land of freedom"
The three winners have made great contributions in discovering new efficient and environmentally friendly light sources, namely blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). With the help of blue LEDs, white light can be created in new ways. Using LED lights, we can have longer lasting and more efficient lights replacing the original light source.
Because of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, people have entered the "realm of freedom" in manufacturing energy-saving light sources. Humans can manufacture any desired LED light - blue LEDs not only allow white light to be created in a new way, but also because of the emergence of blue LEDs, people can complement the three primary colors, making the spectrum of LED light sources that humans can manufacture a wider range, which can be said to enter the realm of freedom.
It is foreseeable that the advancement of blue LED technology will be a revolution in the field of lighting in the 21st century. In the future, we will produce light sources close to natural light through this technology. At the same time, lower-priced and more efficient LED lights can allow more people to get lighting, because there are still 1.5 billion people on the earth. The area that is not covered by the power grid, which shows that the research results of these three scientists have contributed greatly to human civilization.
ANNA