Amano Hiroshi

Amano Hiroshi (born September 11, 1960, Hamamatsu, Japan) is a Japanese materials scientist who was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs). He shared the prize with Japanese materials scientist Akasaki Isamu and Japanese-born American materials scientist Shuji Nakamura.

Amano became a student in Akasaki’s group as an undergraduate at Nagoya University in 1982. There he received bachelor’s (1983), master’s (1985), and doctoral degrees (1989) in engineering, and he was a research associate from 1988 to 1992. In 1992 he and Akasaki moved to Meijo University, where Amano became an assistant professor. He became an associate professor in 1998 and a professor in 2002. Amano returned to Nagoya University as a professor in 2010.

In an LED, light is emitted when current flows across a p-n junction, the interface between a p-type (positive) and an n-type (negative) semiconductor. LEDs are very energy-efficient light sources. Before the work of Amano, Akasaki, and Nakamura, red and green LEDs existed but, because attempts to make blue LEDs were unsuccessful, LEDs could not be used as a source of white light, which requires a combination of blue, red, and green light. Much work had gone into trying to produce the blue LED by using zinc selenide (ZnSe) as the semiconducting material. However, Amano and Akasaki decided to use gallium nitride (GaN), even though no one had produced usable GaN crystals and p-type GaN. In 1986 Amano and Akasaki created high-quality GaN crystals by placing an aluminum nitride layer on a sapphire substrate and then growing the crystals on that. In 1989 Amano and Akasaki made p-type GaN, which glowed much brighter when under an electron microscope, thus showing that electron beams would improve the material. The p-type and n-type layers were combined to form blue LEDs in 1992. (Working independently at the same time, Nakamura made blue LEDs with slightly different techniques.)

Into the 1990s Amano and Akasaki worked to make the GaN blue LEDs more efficient. They also worked on blue GaN laser diodes, which have applications ranging from medicine to laser projectors and which form the heart of Blu-ray disc players.