Hiroshi Amano

Hiroshi Amano is a Japanese electronics engineer who, as a graduate student working under Isamu Akasaki at Nagoya University, developed the low-temperature aluminum nitride buffer layer that finally allowed high-quality gallium nitride crystals to be grown on a sapphire substrate, and used it to help produce the first working blue light-emitting diode in 1989. That breakthrough, combined with achieving p-type conduction in the material, opened the way to bright and efficient blue and white LED lighting, and in 2014 Amano shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which the Nobel committee credited with enabling energy-saving white light sources. He has continued his gallium nitride research at Nagoya University, where he has directed the Akasaki Research Center since 2011.