Three Japanese scientists have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes (LED).
 
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Tuesday that Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura were selected as prize laureates
 
Akasaki and Amano are both professors at Nagoya University, while Nakamura is a professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. The trio successfully developed the blue LED in Japan in the 1990s.
 
Their achievement is assessed to have ushered in a new era of white LED which is four times brighter than incandescent bulbs and 18 times brighter than fluorescent lights. White LED lamps also have a long life expectancy of 100-thousand hours.
 
The three will share the Nobel Prize, which is worth around one-point-one million dollars.
 
A prize ceremony will be held in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10.