The United States uses metamaterial design to make LED light like laser to achieve more efficient automotive lighting

Publisher:daasddlaLatest update time:2020-07-01 Source: 盖世汽车Keywords:UCSB  Schuller  Iyer  LED Reading articles on mobile phones Scan QR code
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According to foreign media reports, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara, UCSB) will use a new method to break the boundaries of LED design, which may pave the way for more efficient and more functional LED display and lighting technology.


Black technology, forward-looking technology, LED automotive lighting, LED design, metamaterials

(Image source: University of California, Santa Barbara)


Jonathan Schuller , a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSB, and his collaborators describe a new method that could make a variety of LED devices, from virtual reality (VR) headsets to automotive lighting, more sophisticated and fashionable.


"What we've demonstrated is a new photonic architecture that not only extracts more photons, but also directs them to the desired location," Schuller said, explaining that this improved performance was achieved without the use of external packaging components that are typically used to control the light emitted by LEDs.


The light in an LED is produced when a semiconductor material is excited, when negatively charged electrons moving along the semiconductor lattice encounter positively charged holes (the absence of electrons) and transition to a lower energy state, releasing a photon in the process. When measuring this process, the researchers found that a significant number of photons were being generated, but not from the LED.


“We realized that if you look at the angular distribution of the emitted photons before patterning, they tend to peak in one particular direction, and that direction is usually trapped in the LED structure,” Schuller said. “So we realized we could use traditional metasurface concepts to engineer light that would normally be trapped.”


The design the researchers settled on consists of an array of 1.45 micrometer-long gallium nitride (GaN) nanorods on a sapphire substrate. Quantum wells made of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) are embedded in the nanorods to confine electrons and holes, which emit light. In addition to allowing more light to leave the semiconductor structure, the design also enables polarized light, which is critical for many applications.


Iyer came up with the idea for the project several years ago while completing his doctorate in Schuller's lab, where research focuses on photonics and photonic phenomena in the subwavelength range. Metasurfaces, engineered surfaces with nanoscale features that interact with light, are also a focus of Iyer's research.


“Metasurfaces are essentially arrays of subwavelength antennas,” said Iyer, who has been studying how to use metasurfaces to steer laser beams. He also learned that typical metasurfaces rely on the highly directional properties of an incoming laser beam to produce a highly directional output beam.


LEDs, on the other hand, emit spontaneous light, unlike the stimulated coherent light of lasers.


"Spontaneous emission samples all possible ways that a photon could move, so the light looks like a beam of photons that can move in all possible directions," Schuller explains. "The question is, can we, through careful nanoscale design and fabrication of the semiconductor surface, direct the generated photons in the desired direction?"


“LEDs have been designed before, but they have always split the light of an LED in multiple directions, which is very inefficient,” Iyer said. “No one has designed a way to control the light of an LED to be emitted in one direction.”


Keywords:UCSB  Schuller  Iyer  LED Reference address:The United States uses metamaterial design to make LED light like laser to achieve more efficient automotive lighting

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