Blinded by the light
Boffins in Korea
claim to have produced the world's first purely white LED.
If the claims
prove true then LEDs could replace compact fluorescent lighting (CFL) as the
next thing to replace iridescent light bulbs. LED's use much less power than
CFLs but are not as bright because they do not have anything that looks like
pure white.
They are not so hot in tellies or computer displays either
because boffins have to spend a lot of the time making LEDs look white when
they are not. Soo-Young Park, a professor of organic materials for
photonics at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul
National University in Korea, led the group. He claims to have engineered a
molecule with one orange and one blue light-emitting material that
produces a white light in the visible light spectrum when put
together.
Tests showed that the new form of LED molecule is efficient, colour
stable, and able to be reproduced. According to the current issue of
Journal of the American Chemical Society which is in the Fudzilla loos at
the moment to save on bog paper, Park claimed to have successfully
synthesized and characterised, for the first time, a white-light-emitting
single molecule dyad, consisting of two noninteracting chromophores showing
excited-state intramolecular proton transfer.
We guess the marketing
people have not had a hand in this statement.