Nobel prize in physics awarded for Blue LED invention

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Tuesday awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2014 to two Japanese and one American scientist for inventing blue light-emitting diodes,"a new energy-efficient and environmentally friendly light source." Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University, Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of University of California, US, will equally share the prize of SEK 8 million (around USD 1.1 million).
"In the spirit of Alfred Nobel the Prize rewards an invention of greatest benefit to mankind; using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way. With the advent of LED lamps we now have more long-lasting and more efficient alternatives to older light sources," said the Academy.
"When Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright blue light beams from their semi-conductors in the early 1990s, they triggered a fundamental transformation of lighting technology. Red and green diodes had been around for a long time but without blue light, white lamps could not be created," it noted.
"Despite considerable efforts, both in the scientific community and in industry, the blue LED had remained a challenge for three decades. They succeeded where everyone else had failed," it added.