The Invention of Blue: The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics

Fall in the Hudson Valley and the trees are displaying their full array of colors, but noticeably absent from this spectrum is blue. A similar absence had for many decades left a vacancy in the production of artificial light. While the semiconductor revolution brought with it computational advances in the form of transistors, energy advances in the form of photovoltaic solar panels, and illumination advances in the form of light emitting diodes, the creation of a solid state source of purely blue light remained elusive. In this talk I’ll give an overview of how Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, the 2014 Nobel Laureates in physics, overcame technical and non-technical barriers to create the first sources of blue light, and explain why this color holds the key to setting off a 21st century revolution in energy efficiency.