The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Tuesday awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2014 to two Japanese and one American scientist for inventing blue light-emitting diodes,"a new energy-efficient and environmentally friendly light source." Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University, Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of University of California, US, will equally share the prize of SEK 8 million (around USD 1.1 million).
"In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources," said the Academy.
"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," it noted.
"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," it added.