The Color That Wasn't There…or surprise everyone. In Tokushima, far from the research centers where the experts had declared the problem impossible, an engineer named Shuji Nakamura was building a reactor in a corner of a chemical factory. Nichia Chemical Industries had no reputation in optoelectronics. The company prod…
A Chemical Company in Tokushima…as only a chemical company on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, and a young engineer reporting for his first day of work. Shuji Nakamura walked through the gates of Nichia Chemical Industries in Anan City, Tokushima Prefecture, carrying a master’s degree in electronic enginee…
The Engineer with a Private Notebook…uld finally emerge. But on a winter night in 1990, those results lived only as blank columns and negative entries in a laboratory notebook. Shuji Nakamura sat alone in the Nichia research building in Tokushima, recording another failed growth run. Temperature: 1030 degrees Celsius. Ammonia flo…
The Color That Wasn't There…im spend its money on a material the field had abandoned. The decision to support Nakamura’s work came from Nichia’s founder and president, Nobuo Ogawa. Ogawa had built the company from a small operation producing phosphors for the Japanese electronics industry. He understood that Nichia’s…
A Chemical Company in Tokushima…bishi and Sony, the companies that mattered. They had not hired him. Nichia hired him. The company made chemicals, not research scientists. Nobuo Ogawa had founded Nichia in 1956, naming it after the Japanese word for “sun” and the Chinese word for “center.” The name reflected his ambition.…
Building the Reactor by Hand…in the same way better-funded researchers had already failed. The calculation was cold, and probably correct. The calculation had convinced Nobuo Ogawa, Nichia’s founder, to fund the project. Ogawa had built his company from nothing, starting with phosphors for cathode-ray tubes and expandi…
The Color That Wasn't There…fferent topic, one with better prospects for funding and publication. Yet not everyone accepted the consensus. In Nagoya, a professor named Isamu Akasaki had continued to work on gallium nitride through the 1980s, long after most of the field had moved on. Akasaki had begun his research at Ma…
A Chemical Company in Tokushima…est to pursue gallium nitride was the culmination of years of thought, not a whim. The gallium nitride community was small and discouraged. Isamu Akasaki and his student Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University continued to work on the material, producing results that the field largely ignored. The…
Building the Reactor by Hand…ineer had become a single system. The parallel work of Akasaki and Amano at Nagoya University provided a distant reference point. Professor Isamu Akasaki had pursued gallium nitride since the early 1980s, maintaining a research program when most of the field had abandoned the material. Hirosh…
The Color That Wasn't There…al rather than fundamental, that better growth methods and better doping techniques could unlock the material’s potential. With his student Hiroshi Amano, he had published results that showed progress, including a method to make strongly p-type gallium nitride by electron-beam irradiation of…
A Chemical Company in Tokushima…was the culmination of years of thought, not a whim. The gallium nitride community was small and discouraged. Isamu Akasaki and his student Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University continued to work on the material, producing results that the field largely ignored. Theodore Moustakas at Boston Univ…
Building the Reactor by Hand…kasaki had pursued gallium nitride since the early 1980s, maintaining a research program when most of the field had abandoned the material. Hiroshi Amano joined Akasaki’s group in 1982 as an undergraduate student and had been researching growth, characterization, and device applications of gr…
The Commercial Dawn…ct during the years of research, now became concrete. Patents filed in 1993 and 1994 bore Nakamura’s name as inventor, but the assignee was Nichia Corporation. Inventions belonged to the company. Revenue belonged to the company. Credit, in the corporate accounting, belonged to the organization tha…
The Citation’s Disputed AuthorsIn a bonus ledger maintained by Nichia Corporation, the entry for fiscal year 1999 recorded a payment of ¥20, 000 to Shuji Nakamura for the filing of a patent. The immense value created by t…
The Price of a Nobel Idea…ad awarded for employee compensation. It dwarfed the ¥2 billion Nakamura had requested in his filing. It represented roughly one-quarter of Nichia Corporation’s annual revenues from the very technology his work had made possible. The judge had not merely granted compensation. He had made a stateme…
The Color That Wasn't There…l problem, a gap in the physics of light that shaped what the electronics industry could build and what consumers could buy. The first blue gallium nitride LEDs had been developed in 1971–1973, but they were feeble. They produced light so dim that it could barely be seen in a darkened room. For…
A Chemical Company in Tokushima…education. Temperature controls drifted, batch compositions varied, and the results taught him what worked and what did not. The first blue gallium nitride LEDs were developed in 1971–1973, but they were feeble. The researchers who made them moved on to other materials. The field had concluded…
Building the Reactor by Hand…mura stood in the laboratory at Nichia’s Tokushima plant, facing another failed crystal growth. The substrate held nothing usable—a film of gallium nitride that had cracked during cooling, its surface a web of fractures reflecting the overhead fluorescent lights. He adjusted the gas valve on th…
Building the Reactor by Hand…rapped in heating elements and gas lines, all assembled from parts sourced individually. No commercial reactor could do what he needed. The two-flow MOCVD reactor represented his answer to problems that had defeated better-equipped laboratories. Conventional reactors introduced precursor gases from a…
A Window in the Gallium Nitride…rial from highly resistive to conductive. Nakamura read their method and adapted it to his own reactor, his own films, his own process. The two-flow MOCVD reactor occupied the center of his laboratory, a machine of his own design assembled from parts that Nichia’s machine shop had fabricated to his sp…
The First Blue Glow…y part. Getting them to work together in a single device structure would require everything he had learned and a few things he had not. The two-flow MOCVD reactor sat against the wall, its custom gas lines and water-cooled chamber now familiar territory after years of failed growths. Nakamura had buil…
The Color That Wasn't There…fference, had moved on. The loop of impossibility had pushed the problem to the margins, where it would either die or surprise everyone. In Tokushima, far from the research centers where the experts had declared the problem impossible, an engineer named Shuji Nakamura was building a react…
A Chemical Company in TokushimaThe tension between the powerful consensus and the faint signals from Tokushima and Nagoya defined the moment. But consensus takes time to form, and signals take time to send. In 1979, the moment had not yet arrived. Th…
Building the Reactor by HandThe pressure now shifted to the concrete, physical struggle of execution. Nakamura stood in the laboratory at Nichia’s Tokushima plant, facing another failed crystal growth. The substrate held nothing usable—a film of gallium nitride that had cracked during cooling, i…
The Color That Wasn't There…ost of the field had moved on. Akasaki had begun his research at Matsushita, one of Japan’s largest electronics companies, before moving to Nagoya University. He believed that gallium nitride’s problems were technical rather than fundamental, that better growth methods and better doping technique…
A Chemical Company in Tokushima…on of years of thought, not a whim. The gallium nitride community was small and discouraged. Isamu Akasaki and his student Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University continued to work on the material, producing results that the field largely ignored. Theodore Moustakas at Boston University pursued a para…
Building the Reactor by Hand…reactor. No one else could interpret results. Equipment and engineer had become a single system. The parallel work of Akasaki and Amano at Nagoya University provided a distant reference point. Professor Isamu Akasaki had pursued gallium nitride since the early 1980s, maintaining a research progr…
The Patent Filing…ourts. The lawsuit Nakamura would file against Nichia in 2001 would challenge the assumption that standard compensation was sufficient. The Tokyo District Court would agree with him, awarding him ¥20 billion, the largest such award in Japanese history. The decision would be appealed, reduced, settle…
The Lawsuit Is FiledThe clerk at the Tokyo District Court accepted the complaint and assigned a case number. The document itself was spare, formal, devastating in its simplicity. Beneath the court…
The Courtroom of PhotonsOn August 29, 2001, a document entered the judicial record at the Tokyo District Court: a civil complaint, stamped with the court’s receiving seal and assigned its docket number. The complaint’s attached exhibit list signaled…
The Committee’s Deliberation…patterns spoke to two kinds of contribution. The committee had to decide whether both kinds were prize-worthy. The decade-long path to the Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was shaped by this tension. The committee could not ignore Nakamura’s achievement. The blue LED had transformed the lighting industry. It h…
The Commercial Dawn…blue LED. Lawsuits had not yet been filed. Disputes over compensation had not yet become public. The break that would send Nakamura to the University of California, Santa Barbara, had not yet occurred. But foundation for those events was being laid. Revenue stream from the blue LED was real and growing. Economic valu…
The Nobel Citation Takes Shape…, each one contributing a paragraph. Nakamura watched this process from a distance. He had left Nichia in 1999, accepting a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The move had multiple causes. Frustration with his compensation. Frustration with his recognition. Frustration with a company that had pro…
The Color White…he specification sheet had been clear about technical targets. It had been silent about rewards. Nakamura began to think about leaving. The University of California, Santa Barbara, had approached him with an offer: a faculty position, a research laboratory, the freedom to pursue his own directions. The contrast with h…