The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.

  • JATth
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    521 year ago

    This was an yet another glorious episode from veritasium.

    I hope we get well past UVC LEDs. (i.e., shorter wavelengths) UV LEDs are already available. Unfortunately, this progress will stop before X-ray light. With +1 KeV energy, you pretty much must blast off the electrons from the atoms to emit X-rays, which an x-ray tube already does. Or by peeling off a piece of scotch tape.

    • Flying Squid
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      421 year ago

      Maybe making X-ray emitters cheap enough to put in a flashlight isn’t the best idea anyway.

      • JATth
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        251 year ago

        Maybe not in a flashlight, but the scientific industry would be very pleased with them. Sterilize water and all surfaces in a second? Flash with 200nm light.

        • @Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          What’s wrong with the current UV tubes? Sure, the smaller ones take about 5-10 W to get the job done, so maybe an LED version would be more efficient. If you’re using UV to keep a massive pool clean, then you’re obviously going to be need more of those bulbs, and they can add up to hundreds of watts quite easily. Is that really a big problem though? Having a pool isn’t cheap, so electricity spent on UV probably isn’t going to be your main concern. Making it cheaper is always welcome, but are UV tubes really that big of a problem?

          • @areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I mean they aren’t instant and have to be within a fairly short distance of the thing you want to sterilize in order to work because they are absorbed by the air. Something like a pool would be practically impossible as water also absorbs UV and a pool is too big to penetrate all the way through just from the sides or bottom. It only works for drinking water because you pass said water through a tube that must be fairly narrow.

            Oh yeah and an X-ray could sterilize all the way through an object, not just the surface. Very useful for making things like microwave meals.

    • @TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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      141 year ago

      More efficient compact X-ray generators would be pretty huge for science work. We run the diffractometer in my lab at 2 kW and it still takes hours to get a good quality scan

      • @collapse_already@lemmy.ml
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        31 year ago

        I imagine that lithography for integrated circuits would be an application, assuming you could make an appropriate photo-resist. The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the possible feature size. Current lithography relies on constructive and destructive interference between wavelengths to create super small features.

        • @ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          21 year ago

          As far as “light” it’s already capped out, then. Going shorter there’s only x-ray and then Gamma ray. Gamma ray lithography sounds bad-ass and dangerous.

          • JATth
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            11 year ago

            Gamma rays have so much energy that they are basically emitted only by nuclear processes, as far as I know.

            • @ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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              11 year ago

              Until we stick it in an led!

              I guess past the uv range we should just call them ED, but then you only think about erectile dysfunction.