Physics and Chemistry 2014 Nobel Prizes are in Photonics

10 October 2014—The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, announced this week the Nobel Prize awards for chemistry and physics in 2014, and both are in the photonics field.

The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University and Nagoya University (both in Japan), Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya Univeristy and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, for the invention of blue LEDs. Blue LEDs were a long elusive goal of scientists; they were the key to enabling environmentally friendly, bright and energy-efficient white light sources when combined with red and green LEDs that had been around for decades. White LED lamps can be powered by cheap local solar power. As LEDs can last up to 100,000 hours compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights, their use by consumers and business has saved on electricity and materials consumption.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA, Stefan W. Hell of Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, as well as William E. Moerner of Stanford University, USA, for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. The recipients applied two different techniques to bypass the maximum resolution limit of optical microscopy of two microns stipulated by Ernst Abbe in 1873. Stefan Hell developed stimulated emission depletion microscopy in 2000, which uses lasers to stimulate fluorescence in molecules and image them at the nanometer-scale. The other method developed by Betzig and Moerner in 2006, single-molecule microscopy, turns on and off the fluorescence of a few individual molecules and superimposes images of them to yield a dense super-image with nanoscale resolution.