Nobel Prize goes to blue LED light inventors

Three scientists share the Nobel physics prize for inventing blue LED lights.

The prize goes jointly to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Starting in the 1990s they produced blue LEDs, an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly source of blue light, which could be mixed with LEDs of other colors to produce what the eye sees as white light. “I am very honored to receive the Nobel Prize from The Royal Swedish Academy of Science for my invention of the blue LED,” said Nakamura in a statement. “It is very satisfying to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality. I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting worldwide.”

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to the astronomers who discovered dark energy.

Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded half of this year’s prize for his work on the Supernova Cosmology Project, with the other half awarded to Brian P. Schmidt from the Australian National University and Adam G. Riess from the Johns Hopkins University and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, for their work on the High-z Supernova Search Team.