Meet the Tiniest Light Bulb Ever Created

Technology can help big companies and cities save millions of dollars in electricity bills. Many cities are already using LED’s for example to reduce power usage. Now a new type of light bulb the size of a atom layer has been created using graphene, it could offer better solutions in the future.

Scientists from the Columbia, Soul National University and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science have completed testing on a new way to turn electricity into light. They used a sheet of graphene the width of an atom layer.

The team connected the graphene sheet between two electrodes using it as a filament and were able to make the material produce light.

The team combined old ideas with new technologies to design this new tiny lightbulb. The problem is that the thinner the filament the greater the chance that the material will be quickly destroyed by the temperature.

By using a supermaterial  called graphene to create the filament, the temperature needed for producing light was reached without material disintegration.

Graphene is a allotrope of carbon with a special shape and is about 200 times stronger by weight than steel. This material if properly produced and studied could revolutionize the world of electronics and computing, as well as many other fields in which nanotechnology can be applied.

Despite the very small scale of the filament used, when the material reached temperatures of about 2500 degrees Celsius visible light was created.

The experiment was successful in proving that even using a small amount of graphene could produce visible light.

The fact that the material could whitstand these kind of temperatures and not break or disintegrate completely, means that it can be used in upgrading current technologies, like microchip producing techniques.

Scientists are trying to create the basic requirements for the manufacture of optic computers, which transmit digital data faster and safer than current silicon chips.

Future supercomputers can achieve this, because instead of using conventional electricity and electrons, to power their operations they use photons produced by lasers or diodes allowing for higher frequencies.

Graphene was used in this experiment or it’s heat transferring properties. As the temperatures get higher graphene conducts heat less effectively, meaning that incandescence is confined to a small spot in the center and does not transfer to the edges of the material.
Image Source: ibtimes.co.uk