Nakamura, Shuji (1954-…), a Japanese American physicist, shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics with the Japanese physicists Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano. All three scientists received the award for their work in developing a blue light-emitting diode (LED). An LED is a tiny device that gives off light in response to an electric current. The breakthrough in blue LED’s enabled the development of LED devices that give off white light. Such devices are longer lasting and more energy efficient than traditional incandescent and fluorescent lights.
White light is actually a mixture of many colors or wavelengths of light. An LED, on the other hand, can produce only a single color. LED devices must produce white light by combining light from several LED’s of differing colors, generally red, green, and blue. The first visible-light LED’s, created in 1962, were red. Green LED’s were developed in the early 1970’s. Blue light, which is more energetic, proved extremely difficult to produce in an LED. In the 1970’s, researchers at the American company RCA concluded that a material combining the metal gallium and nitrogen, called gallium nitride (GaN), could serve as the basis for a blue LED. However, the company encountered financial difficulties and canceled further research.
Akasaki later began working with gallium nitride. Amano joined him at Nagoya University as an undergraduate student in 1982. In 1986, the pair succeeded in manufacturing a suitable GaN crystal. Over the next decade, Akasaki and Amano and, separately, Nakamura refined the process of producing GaN crystals for blue LED’s. Akasaki and Nakamura created the first blue LED in 1989, but it was relatively dim. The pair would develop a bright LED in 1992, with Nakamura creating a commercially viable blue LED in 1993.
Nakamura was born on May 22, 1954, in Ikata, on the Japanese island Shikoku. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1977 and a master’s degree in 1979—both in electronic engineering—from the University of Tokushima. He joined the chemical company Nichia in 1979, remaining there until 1999. He joined the University of California, Santa Barbara, as a professor in 1999. In the early 2000’s, he fought a legal battle with Nichia over his research patents. In 2005, he was awarded a settlement of about $8 million. In 2008, he helped start Soraa, a lighting company that makes use of GaN technology.
