Millenium Prize to Nakamura

Prof. Shuji Nakamura (photo courtsey: Univ. California, Santa Barbara)

Finland's Millenium Prize Foundation said Thursday that its one-million-euro technology prize had been awarded to Shuji Nakamura, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and inventor of the high-brightness gallium nitride light-emitting diode (LED) and a blue laser. In 1993, Prof. Nakamura stunned the optoelectronic community with the announcement of very-bright blue GaN-based light emitting diodes (LEDs). In rapid succession, he then announced a green GaN-based LED, a blue laser diode, and a white LED. All these developments were things that other researchers in the semiconductor field had spent decades trying to do.

LED lights consume much less energy than incandescent lamps and are well-suited to operation with solar power systems and therefore ideal for use in developing countries. A significant future application of Prof Nakamura's invention is the sterilisation of drinking water, for the use of ultraviolet LEDs makes the purification process cheaper and more efficient, improving the lives and health of millions. Further, data storage and transfer using light from blue lasers enables a 5-fold increase in the amount of data stored on compact or digital versatile discs.

Photo: Time Square lit by LED

Prof Nakamuri is to receive the Millenium Technology Prize at a ceremony to be held in Helsinki on 8 November. The biennial prize is awarded for an innovation judged to improve the quality of human life and well-being. In 2004, the first prize was awarded to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.

Biography: Born in 1954 in Japan on the island called Shikoku, Prof. Nakamura received his master’s degree in 1979 at the University of Tokushima. He started his scientific and technological career working as an engineer at Nichia Chemical, a small phosphor company in the countryside. At Nichia Chemical’s laboratory, with only a limited budget and modest support from company management, Nakamura developed a highly-original two-flow growth system which led to the successful epitaxial growth of gallium nitride (GaN) in 1989. In 1992 he managed to produce p-type GaN, a fundamental breakthrough in III-V nitride research. Since the beginning of research into GaN almost three decades earlier, no-one had been able to create this particular compound. In 1993 Nakamura demonstrated bright-blue LEDs. Two years later he announced a green GaN-based LED, a blue laser diode, and a white LED. In 1994, Nakamura received his doctorate in engineering at the University of Tokushima. Five years later he left Japan and joined the engineering faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). At UCSB he has built up a significant research programme in new areas of nitride research.