For the New Year Eve 2006/07 celebration, lighting giant Philips Electronics will outfit the ball with an interior of more efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Michele Muccini and colleagues at the National Research Agency, Bologna, Italy, produced such an organic light-emitting transistor and, as expected, found that it was much more efficient than present light-emitting diodes.
Audi was a pioneer in bringing LEDs — light emitting diodes, a more efficient and longer lasting replacement for conventional bulbs — to automotive lighting and in using them as a styling element.
However, the electronic properties touching off the high performance of these heterostructures and the possibility of designing more efficient applications for the rectifier diode were not presently clear.
Then a more efficient light source - light emitting diodes - came on the market.
His gallium nitride bright, green and blue, light emitting diodes, 10 100 times more efficient than their predecessors, enable color displays and lighting applications and are potential seeds of a new lighting industry.
We have moved from the simple, yet inefficient incandescent light bulbs (as of August last year, these have been banned from sale in the EU) to low energy bulbs and, increasingly, to more expensive but more efficient and longer-lasting, light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.
Most of these tubes were replaced in the late 70s by ceramic diode replacement inserts, that were even more high performance diode tubes and were more efficient in their service, but there are still some of the High Voltage Mercury vapor rectifier tubes in use.
Within five years, the industry believes, diode-based lights will be more efficient than compact fluorescents.
The quest for more efficient blue emitters to be applied in organic light-emitting diodes is one of the challenging tasks of contemporary nanotechnologies.
