New UV LED lamp for portable devices

Ohio State University is developing a new type of UV LED, it may bring us more portable lamps and lower cost technology.

This patent pending LED, creating a market than commercial LED UV wavelength of ultraviolet light is more accurate, and can be run at lower voltage, than other experimental methods for creating accurate UV wavelengths more concise. The LED is suitable for chemical testing applications, disinfection applications and UV curing applications. After further development, perhaps one day it will be able to provide a source of UV laser surgery and computer chip manufacturing.

In the applied physics letters, engineers at the Ohio State University described how they created LED from the semiconductor nanowires doped with rare earth elements gadolinium (Gd). One of the co authors, College of materials science and engineering Ohio State University associate professor Roberto Myers, said: "the unique design allows engineers to nanowires energized to activate rare earth metals, and this is no idea of our team. To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever been able to drive electrons through LED's internal gadolinium, we just want to know what happens next. "

Gadolinium is not used to make high-quality UV LED, but to conduct a simple experiment to explore the basic properties of a new material that they are studying. In the course of the experiment, Dr. Thomas Kent noted that the strong emission lines of gadolinium can control the current. When different elements are excited, they can emit different wavelengths of fluorescence, while the fluorescence intensity of gadolinium is the most intense. Engineers have found that gadolinium doped nanowires glow with light at certain UV frequencies. It is not uncommon to activate different materials to produce light, but it is difficult to activate the material under UV light. The only other reported electronically controlled gadolinium ray emission requires more than 250V of the voltage. The team at the Ohio State University found that the same effect could be produced in the LED structure of the nanowires at an operating voltage of about 10V. High voltage devices are difficult to miniaturization, while the nanowire LED because only 10V voltage, which is very helpful for portable devices.

As for the cost, Kent pointed out that their team grew LED on a standard silicon wafer, which is cheaper and easier to scale in industrial production.

The team is currently trying to maximize the efficiency of UV LED, Ohio State University of technology commercialization and industry knowledge transfer office will issue licenses for the design and method of making special gadolinium doped nanowires.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the emerging materials center of Ohio State University.