International light year 2015

#Discovery of blue LED

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded
jointly to Isamu
Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for
the invention
Of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has
enabled bright
And energy-saving white light sources. The
following article is
An effort to tell our readers how the invention took
place and
The significance of the invention.
Incidentally, the United Nations proclaimed the
year
2015 as the International Year of Light and Lightbased
Technologies to recognize the importance of light
and light based
Technologies in the lives of the citizens of the
world, and
For the future development of global society on
many level

For a long time scientists had believed thatlight

emitting diodes (LEDs) can neverbe used as source
of light for general lighting
and that their usage would be limited toornamental
lighting and display deviceslike televisions, mobile
phones and similar gadgets. The belief was due to
difficulty inproducing blue light-emitting diodes,
oneof the key constituents necessary to produce
white light from LED.
Red and green light emitting
Diodes have been
in use for over half a century,
but blue light was needed
to really revolutionize
Lighting technology. Only the triad of red, green and
blue can produce white light that can be used for
general illumination. Despite intensive research
undertaken by scientists, blue light-emitting LED
remained a challenge for
three decade leds produce light directly from
electrical energy without any intermediate stage. As
a result, LEDs
are far more energy-efficient compared to other
sources of artificial light, where only a
fraction of total electrical energy is converted to light.
In case of incandescent lamps,

electrical energy is first converted to heat energy and

the heated filament subsequently emits light. In case
of a fluorescent tube or
CFL, electrical energy is first used to ionize a gas and
subsequently produce light by fluorescence of a
phosphor coated on the
inside of the tube. In the absence of anyintermediate
stage, LEDs require lesser
energy to emit light compared to other light sources.
Moreover LED technology
is constantly improving to produce higher luminous
flux (measured in lumens) per
unit of electrical energy. For example, LEDs can
produce 300 lumens per watt of
electrical energy compared to 16 lumens for regular
incandescent lamps and 70 lumensfor fluorescent
lamps. As about one-fourth
of world electricity consumption is used for lighting
purposes, so the highly energyefficient
LEDs can contribute to substantial saving of Earths
resources.
LEDs are also long lasting. On anaverage,

LED lamp can last for over

an