 Nichia's
Shuji Nakamura on
Blue Laser Diodes
The history of science has more than its share of underdog stories—researchers working off the beaten track who succeed where others can’t—but few of them, if any, are as remarkable as the story of Shuji Nakamura and the blue laser diode. For decades the blue laser was the ultimate dream in laser technology. The reason was a simple combination of physics and market economics. Blue light has the shortest wavelength of visible light. Build a blue laser diode, and you could quadruple the amount of data that could be read and stored on a compact disc, a CD-ROM, or a digital video disc
(DVD) player. With red and green laser diodes already on the shelves, blue was the last of the primary colors left to tackle, and if that could be done, one could imagine a device that combined blue, red, and green and emitted white light, perhaps putting the light bulb as we know it out of
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Cosmology Cops Cosmic Crown
 osmology dominates the latest Science Watch survey of
"high-impact" research in astronomy and astrophysics over the
last three years. Science Watch collected 3,432 papers published in
ISI-indexed space-science journals between 1996 and 1998 (along with
pertinent papers from Science and Nature); the papers were
each cited 10 or more times through June of 1999. The most-cited papers of
each year are listed on....
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