LED lights have been around for decades, but the development of bright leds won a Nobel Prize and ushered in a new era of lighting. However, even modern leds have their limitations, which frustrates their designers. Up to a point, increasing the amount of power in an LED will make it glow more brightly, but soon the brightness will be reduced, making leds very inefficient. The problem, known in the industry as "efficiency degradation," has hampered the use of leds in many promising applications, from communications technology to antivirus applications.

Although the researchers' new LED design overcomes this loss of efficiency, the researchers didn't initially set out to solve the problem. Their main goal is to create tiny leds for very small applications, such as the on-chip laboratory technology that NIST and other scientists are pursuing.

The team experimented with a new design for the light-emitting PART: Instead of the graphic design used in traditional leds, the researchers used long, thin lines of zinc oxide to create a light source they called a fin. (" long "and" thin "are relative: each fin is only about five microns long, about one-tenth the width of the average human hair.) Their fin array looks like a small comb and can extend to an area of 1 centimeter or more.

The researchers' new design emits bright wavelengths that straddle the boundary between purple and ULTRAVIOLET light, producing 100 to 1,000 times more energy than a typical small LED. Nikoobakht described this result as an important foundational discovery.