Blue light-emitting diodes or LEDs, seemingly an ordinary technology found in devices from TV screens to traffic lights, have won the Nobel Prize in physics for three researchers involved in their development.
Two Japanese and one American researcher have been awarded the prize for the invention of 20 years ago that produced lights using far less energy than preceding technologies such as incandescents and fluorescents.
Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, professors at Nagoya University, and American citizen Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, will share the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.
While red and green LED's had existed for some time, LED white lamps -- which would mimic the white light of the sun by blending red, green and blue -- could not be created without the development of blue LEDs.
After red LEDs were invented in the early 1960s, almost 25 years would pass before Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura succeeded, using improved semiconductor materials and manufacturing techniques, to create blue LEDs, triggering "a fundamental transformation of lighting technology," the Swedish academy said.
Since that development, white lighting made possible with blue LEDs have found a place in home lighting, smartphones, data storage, high-speed networking and many other areas.
White LED lighting has even been used in car headlamps.
LED lamps will improve the quality of life for more than 1.5 billion people around the globe without access to electricity grids since the low power requirements of LED light bulbs means they can by power by inexpensive local solar power, experts said.
"A quarter of [global] energy consumption goes to illumination," Per Delsing, a physics professor at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, said an event announcing the award.
Any lighting technology offering an increase in efficiency and therefore a saving of energy "is really going to have a big impact on modern civilization," he said.
LED lighting is much more efficient that incandescent bulbs, which while producing their light waste most of the input energy as heat.
Fluorescent lights improve on incandescent bulbs with a four-fold increase in efficiency, but can't match the 20-fold improvement offered by LED bulbs.
Fluorescent bulbs can also present a health-risk with their dependence on potentially toxic mercury to create their light.
In winning the Nobel Prize, Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura will share in the monetary award of around $1.1 million which, in the spirit of Alfred Nobel, was given for "an invention of greatest benefit to mankind," the prize committee said on its website.
