Electrician Nick Holonyak Jr., who has come to be known as the godfather of LED lighting to illuminate flat-panel TVs and laptop computers, and who also invented the lasers that enable DVD and CD players, barcode scanners and medical diagnostic equipment, 18th in Urbana, Illinois. he was 93 years old.
His death at the nursing home was announced by his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught from 1963 until his retirement in 2013. The day after he died, the campus’s State Farm Center The arena was dyed red to commemorate the invention of the first visible light-emitting diode in 1962.
Professor Holonyak (pronounced huh-LON-yak) was the first to predict that LEDs would eventually replace incandescent light bulbs, which heat a metal filament to produce energy, and fluorescent lights, which use ionized gases. I was one of the scientists. A grain of sand that emits photons when an electric current is passed through it.
Professor Holonyak described the LED as “the ultimate lamp” because “current itself is light”.
LEDs generate less heat, consume less power and last longer than incandescent bulbs. They are also safer for the environment than fluorescent lamps, which contain mercury. The Department of Energy estimates that LEDs will make up more than 80% of all lighting purchases by the end of 2010, cutting Americans’ electricity bills by about $30 billion annually.
“Nick Holonyak didn’t just invent the first visible LED. From the beginning he predicted that LEDs would eventually replace all other forms of electric lighting, and it’s on track. Illumination” (2017).
But in 2014, two other scientists, Hiroshi Amano of Japan and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, won. nobel prize in physics For the successful development of high-brightness blue light-emitting diodes in 1993. This diode had to mix red and green to create white illumination and produce a spectrum of other colors. (Prof. Holonyak’s early invention of a diode that emits red light explains why the displays of alarm clocks and calculators have long been red, and only red.)
“Mr. Holonyak was a pioneer, a visionary, a great scientist and an educator,” Johnstone said in an email. “What he didn’t share with the Nobel Prize is the farce of justice, which has to do with the narrow criteria by which the prize is awarded (the committee likes to limit winners to a single discovery), It has nothing to do with the incontrovertible magnitude of his achievement.”
Russell D. Dupuy, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Compound Semiconductors, said Holonyak missed out on the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, not only in 2014 but also in 2000. His contribution was made by Holonyak. ”
Professor Holonyak’s collaborators Herbert Cromer, a German-American, and Zores I. Alferov, a Russian, Share in 2000 Awards For his discoveries in semiconductor and low-energy laser technology that were quickly applied to practical applications such as mobile phones, fiber optics, CD players and barcode readers.
“Nick Holonyak is a national treasure,” said Mary Beth Gotti, manager of the General Electric Lighting and Electrical Institute. said in 2012 50th anniversary of Professor Holonyak’s discovery. “His curiosity and drive to explore and invent have inspired thousands of students and countless innovations.”
Professor Holonyak was born on November 3, 1928, in Ziegler, Illinois, to Nick Holonyak Sr. and Anna (Rosoja) Holonyak, immigrants from what is now Western Ukraine. His father was a miner.
The first formal education in his family, Nick Jr. became obsessed with electricity when he helped his godmother fix a spark coil in a Ford Model T. At the age of 15, he moved to Illinois.
“Inexpensive, reliable diode lasers, essential to DVD players, barcode readers, and many other devices, have been in some form or another thanks to the grueling workload imposed on downtown railroad crews decades ago. ,” Professor Holonyak told the Chicago Tribune in 2003.
As a freshman at the University of Illinois’ expanded campus in Granite City, he turned down an instructor’s invitation to switch from electrical engineering to chemistry.
In The Bright Stuff: The LED and Nick Holonyak’s Fantastic Trail, Laura Schmidt writes, “Chemistry is too much like learning a cookbook, too many recipes to learn, and I’m more interested in electrical science. I told him,” he said. innovation” (2012).
In 1950, 1951, and 1954, he received his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. nobel prize in physics Twice.
Professor Holonyak married Katherine Jerger in 1955. She is his sole survivor. He completed his military service in the Army Signal Corps in Japan in 1957.
From 1957 to 1963, he worked at General Electric’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York. So he created a gallium arsenide phosphide crystal that emits visible red light.
“It’s good that I was an engineer instead of a chemist,” he said in a 2012 interview with General Electric. If you’re a chemist, you know it doesn’t work.
He returned to the University of Illinois in 1963, where he assumed a professorship in the name of his doctoral advisor, Professor Bardeen. Professor Holonyak and his Milton Feng ran the Transistor Laser Research Center at the university.
He holds 41 patents and has received numerous awards in engineering and technology, including the Global Energy Award, the National Science and Technology Award, and the National Academy of Engineering Draper Award.
He worked side by side with graduate students in windowless offices and labs, shunning computers and calculators and the theoretical abstractions that often dominate the world of physics. Instead, he tinkered with practical solutions to everyday challenges.
“I didn’t take a sabbatical,” he told NPR’s “Tech Nation” host Moira Gunn in 2012. I can make something
Craig Mellow contributed to the report.