Introduction to Nitride Semiconductor Blue Lasers and Light Emitting Diodes

The 'blue laser' is an exciting new device whose potential is now being recognised in commercial lighting systems. This comprehensive work introduces the subject at a level suitable for graduate students.
The potential of the "blue laser" device is being recognized for its development into a commercial lighting system using about a tenth of the power and with a thousand times the operating lifetime of a comparable conventional system. This work introduces the subject at a level suitable for graduate students. It covers the basic physics of light emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes (LDs) based on gallium nitride and related nitride semiconductors, and gives an outline of their structural, transport and optical properties, and the relevant device physics. It begins with the fundamentals, and covers both theory and experiment, as well as an examination of actual and potential device applications. Shuji Nakamura and Nichia Chemical Industries made the initial breakthroughs which have revealed blue LEDs and LDs as a sophisticated physical phenomenon and a commercial reality.