Nobel physics prize honors inventors of blue LEDs

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences : Isamu Akasaki (Meijo University, Nagoya, Japan), Hiroshi Amano (Nagoya University, Japan), and Shuji Nakamura (University of California, Santa Barbara) are the awardees of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the laureates overcame a range of challenges in physics and materials science to develop efficient blue light-emitting diodes. Red and green LEDs had been available since the late 1960s. The invention of blue LEDs, which made their debut in 1993, completed the visual spectrum and made it possible for LEDs to be used for a wide variety of lighting applications. Compared with incandescent light bulbs, LEDs are 10 times more energy efficient, last 50 times longer, and are more physically robust. Given that 20–30% of the world’s electricity is consumed by lighting, the widespread adoption of LED lighting should lead, in the words of the Nobel committee, “to significant energy savings of great benefit to mankind.”