Why Blue LED Impossible Hard to Make
You’ve seen transparent OLEDs, but did you know that the blue LED was notoriously hard to make due to p-type gallium nitride? That’s right, they had to figure out how to make a blue LED was that would continue to operate for hundreds of hours, without destroying itself.



Each blue photon has higher energy than a red photon or a green photon, thus making it harder to keep the device cool. As the temperature rises, atomic diffusion increases, so keeping the temperature down is essential for long device lifetime. However, nobody was able to grow gallium nitride crystals of high enough quality, that is until Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura figured out a method for doing so.

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While blue LEDs have now been manufactured for over a decade, there has always been a gap in our understanding of how they actually work, and this is where our study comes in. Naïvely, based on what is seen in other common semiconductors such as silicon, you would expect each magnesium atom added to the crystal to donate one hole. But in fact, to donate a single mobile hole in gallium nitride, at least a hundred atoms of magnesium have to be added. It’s technically extremely difficult to manufacture gallium nitride crystals with so much magnesium in them, not to mention that it’s been frustrating for scientists not to understand what the problem was,” said says John Buckeridge (UCL Chemistry), lead author of the study.

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