2014 Nobel Prize in Physics
Strive to cultivate backwards until the end of the year
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Isamu Akasaki, a lifelong professor at Meijo University in Japan, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014 for the development of blue light-emitting diodes (LED), died on the 1st due to pneumonia. 92 years old.
The deceased in 1986, while serving as a professor at Nagoya University, succeeded in making high-quality gallium nitride crystals necessary for realizing the blue light of LEDs with his student Hiroshi Amano (60), a professor at Nagoya University. Among the three primary colors of light, red and green LEDs were already developed in the 1960s, but blue LEDs have been difficult to develop because it is difficult to make gallium nitride, a core material, into crystals.
Professor Akasaki achieved high-quality crystallization by making a thin film between the substrate and gallium nitride, and succeeded in manufacturing the world’s first bright blue LED in 1989. This opened the way for all colors to be realized with LEDs, and Professor Akasaki was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of this achievement.
Professor Akasaki was born in Kagoshima Prefecture, graduated from the Faculty of Science at Kyoto University in 1952, worked as an assistant professor at the School of Engineering at Nagoya University, and served as the head of the Tokyo Institute of Semiconductors at Matsushita Electric Industries (now Panasonic). He is known to have devoted himself to blue LED development since 1973 while working at Matsushita. Since 1981, he served as a professor at the Nagoya University Faculty of Engineering, and after retiring from retirement in 1992, he worked hard to cultivate younger generations as a special professor at Nagoya University and as a permanent professor at Meijo University.
/ Reporter Kihyuk Kim [email protected]
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