A solid-state lamp that emits high-energy ultraviolet (UV) light at the shortest wavelengths, ever recorded for such a device, was developed by the Japanese researchers.
The UV light travel in the range from 140 to 220 nanometers.
It’s this property has made the vacuum UV light advantageous for industrial usage like sterilizing medical devices, cleaning semiconductor substrates, etc.
The newly-developed UV lamps have many advantages over the traditional lamps.Existing commercial vacuum UV lamps are bulky, expensive, use excess power, have short lifetimes and contain toxic gasses that can pollute the environment and harm people.
Due to the presence of solid-state phosphor made from a thin film of KMgF3, the new lamp doesn’t have those issues.
The Japanese researchers are continuing their work on these lamps in a bid to make new innovations become more promising.
“Our lamp is a promising light source in terms of lifetime, size, heat conduction and stability. It has the potential to be an excellent alternate light source to low-pressure mercury lamps, excimer lamps and deuterium lamps,” said lead researcher Shingo Ono of the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan.
The article, “Vacuum ultraviolet field emission lamp utilizing KMgF3 thin film phosphor” is authored by Masahiro Yanagihara, Zamri Yusop, Masaki Tanemura, Shingo Ono, Tomohito Nagami, Kentaro Fukuda, Toshihisa Suyama, Yuui Yokota, Takayuki Yanagida and Akira Yoshikawa.
The study was published in the journal APL Materials on April 22, 2014