Blue lasers

To quote the BBC News

The 2006 Millennium Technology Prize has been awarded to Professor Shuji Nakamura, the inventor who is said to have kicked started the "blue laser revolution"

More than 10 years agao professor Nakamura invented light-emitting semiconductors including a blue semiconductor laser. Since then many refinements have been made and his blue light has been spreading and is used in home lighting, video displays and communication technology.

From Science Watch

Nakamura may have single-handedly, or virtually so, changed the technological face of the world. And his research papers certainly reflect his influence: a few years back his paper on "InGaN-based multi-quantum well-structure laser diodes" (see the table on the next page, paper #1) was number 6 on the Science Watch list of Red Hot Research Papers of 1996 one of only three physical-sciences papers to rank among the year’s most-cited reports. That paper subsequently enjoyed a long run in the Physics Top Ten during 1997. More recently, a 1998 paper, "Continuous-wave operation of InGaN/GaN/AlGaN-based laser diodes grown on an epitaxially laterally overgrown GaN substrate" (Appl. Phys. Lett., 72[2]:211-3, 1998), has also appeared among the Top Ten. "What I have managed to achieve," Nakamura has written, "shows that anybody with relatively little special experience in the field, no big money, and no collaborations with universities or other companies, can achieve considerable success alone when he tries a new research area without being obsessed with conventional ideas and knowledge."

While people may be moaning about PS3 delays due to shortages of blue lasers, that same laser is taking information storage several steps further and increasing the amount of data one can store on a single piece of media well past 100GB.


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Michael Harrison

Husband, Programmer, Irish dancer, tinkerer, astronomer, layabout (as much as possible)

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