Image: UCSB BLUE LIGHTS, BIG CITY. Artists rendering shows Times Square lit by GaN blue LED technology.

I press a button on the pocket light-emitting diode tester and three specks of plastic and semiconductor shoot out blue and green rays intense enough to hurt my eyes. The two blue devices emit a furious cerulean with just the slightest hint of violet. The green is sharp and rich¿not that ghastly yellowish hue that had to do if you wanted a "green" LED until recently.

Until, that is, the man who is grinning at me, Shuji Nakamura, got some very bright ideas.

Nakamura, the newest addition to the engineering faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, stunned the semiconductor world late in 1999 when he revealed that was leaving Nichia Corporation, a once small and obscure Japanese maker of phosphors for cathode-ray tubes and fluorescent lights. Thanks to Nakamura, Nichia now fabricates the world¿s best blue LEDs, the best green LEDs, and the world¿s only commercially available blue-violet semiconductor lasers¿distinctions that have pushed Nichia to the verge of being a half-billion-dollar-a-year company with sales all over the world. Most remarkable of all, Nakamura, working alone and with a tight research budget, managed to open up a lead measured in years over some of the titans of U.S., Japanese, and European industrial research. Even more incredible, the companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Stanley Electric, Sharp, Sanyo, Sumitomo, Toshiba, Toyoda Gosei, NEC, Sony and Philips, still have not caught up. The situation is without precedent in the half-century history of semiconductor research.

Analysts estimate that those companies, along with a couple dozen universities, spent roughly $1 billion in pursuit of blue-light devices since the 1960s. And it is easy to understand why. For more than 25 years, LEDs¿the most efficient lights yet produced¿were like a third of a rainbow. Red, orange, yellow and that yellowish-green were all you could get. Engineers wanted blue and true green because with those colors, along with the red they already had, they could build fabulous things, such as a a white-light-emitting device as much as 12 times more efficient and 12 times longer-lasting than an ordinary lightbulb. Small wonder, then, that analysts say LEDs are poised to revolutionize the lighting industry and move beyond their familiar role as mere indicator lights on electronic equipment. In the meantime, colored LEDs are being deployed as traffic lights and in displays, the biggest being the eight-story-tall Nasdaq display in New York City¿s Times Square.

The potential bonanza does not end there. The blue-light semiconductor laser, an offshoot of the LED, also has tremendous commercial possibilities. These are linked to the fact that the wavelength of blue light is about half that of the infrared semiconductor lasers typically found in CD players and laser printers. A wavelength half as long translates into a cost-free quadrupling of the amount of data that can be put on a CD or in the resolution of a laser printer.

Image: UCSB OPTICAL STORAGE SYSTEM. The gallium nitride-based lasers in such future devices have shorter wavelengths of light, enabling much more information to be stored on CDs and DVDs than at present.

Most of the milestones on the way to these optoelectronics triumphs took place, oddly enough, on the island of Shikoku, something of a backwater in the Japanese chain. There Nakamura was born, raised and educated at the University of Tokushima. He graduated from the "medium-class" institution, as he describes it, with a master¿s degree in electrical engineering in 1979 and aspired to a career in R&D at a company like Sony or Toshiba. But a professor discouraged him, noting that if he went off to a big city, he would be just another salaryman, unable to afford a house. With a wife and a baby on the way, he reluctantly decided to stay on Shikoku. He got an R&D job at Nichia, which then had about 200 employees, was doing about $30 million a year selling phosphors and was looking to get into the market for LEDs. After a researcher changed jobs, the company¿s entire R&D department consisted of Nakamura, his boss and one other employee. He was the only person with a master¿s degree and the only electrical engineer in the company.