Saturday, April 26, 2014: In a ground breaking finding of sorts, University of Michigan researchers Dylan Bayerl and Emmanouil Kioupakis have found that the semiconductor indium nitride (InN) will emit visible green light when reduced to half the breadth of a DNA strand, contradicting its own typical infrared light emitting nature. Further, tailoring these nanostructures by varying their sizes, they could be made to emit other colours. Over a period of time, they could lead to more natural-looking white lighting that in turn could lead to much greater level of efficiency in traditional LEDs.
Using the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC) Cray XC30 supercomputer ‘Edison’, the researchers have found that indium nitride nanostructures offer a promising approach when it came to avoiding some of the efficiency loss current LEDs experience at high power.
The current breed of LEDs consist of multilayered microchips with the outer layers laced with elements that create an abundance of electrons on one layer and a deficiency on the other. The missing electrons are termed as ‘holes’. When energised, the electrons and holes come together eliminating excess energy in the form of a photon. The traditional nitride-based LEDs used currently are efficient at low power, however, at higher power level, this is not the case. At higher power only a small fraction of electricity gets converted into light. The effect is more pronounced in green LEDs (green gap). Indium Nitride Nanostructures now open up larger avenues for thin, flexible and high-resolution, yet efficient LEDs in the future.
