"Built of aluminum foil, sapphire and small amounts of gas, the panels are less than 1 millimeter thick, and can hang on a wall like picture frames," said University of Illinois Professor Gary Eden.
As conventional fluorescent lights, microcavity plasma lamps use glow-discharges in which atoms of a gas are excited by electrons and radiate light. Unlike fluorescent lights, however, microcavity plasma lamps produce the plasma in microscopic pockets and require no ballast, reflector or heavy metal housing.
Eden said the panels are lighter, brighter and more efficient than incandescent lights and are expected, with further engineering, to approach or surpass the efficiency of fluorescent lighting.
"Each lamp is approximately the diameter of a human hair," said visiting research scientist Sung-Jin Park, lead author of a paper describing the research. "We can pack an array of more than 250,000 lamps into a single panel."
The research appears in the June issue of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International
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