WORLD'S THINNEST BULB

New technology increases opportunities, make us more efficient and increase our power.

So here is a new step in technology, world thinnest bulb is made from graphene.

Graphene, is a form of carbon famous for being stronger than steel and more conductive than copper, can add another wonder to the list: making light.

You can now forget LED light bulbs in future, your lighting may be made from graphene. Researchers have developed a light-emitting graphene transistor that works in the same way as the filament in a light bulb.

For the first time, scientists say they’ve created a flexible and transparent light source with carbon in its purest form. They say their discovery could also eventually transform computers by using light rather than electronic circuits in semiconductor chips

Now the question is why graphene?

Because graphene has an interesting property: when it heats up, it becomes a poor conductor of heat. Thus, the heat it creates is confined to the filament and doesn't melt the surrounding chip.

Researchers of Columbian university built a light bulb chip that superheats graphene to produce illumination.

When an electric current runs through the filament, it heats 

up enough to emit light.

They actually attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate, and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up

The graphene filament measures just one atom thick -- this is

 the world's thinnest light bulb, and may be close to being the thinnest possible. It's transparent, too, which could suit it to see-through displays.

Creating light in small structures on the surface of a chip is crucial for developing fully integrated 'photonic' circuits that do with light what is now done with electric currents in semiconductor integrated circuits. Researchers have developed many approaches to do this, but have not yet been able to put the oldest and simplest artificial light source—the incandescent light bulb—onto a chip. This is primarily because light bulb filaments must be extremely hot—thousands of degrees Celsius—in order to glow in the visible range and micro-scale metal wires cannot withstand such temperatures. In addition, heat transfer from the hot filament to its surroundings is extremely efficient at the microscale, making such structures impractical and leading to damage of the surrounding chip.

This was the first time that researchers demonstrated an on chip visible light source using graphene. By measuring the spectrum of the light emitted from the graphene, the team was able to show that the graphene was reaching temperatures of above 2500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to glow brightly. "The visible light from atomically thin graphene is so intense that it is visible even to the naked eye, without any additional magnification," explains Young Duck Kim, first and co-lead author on the paper and postdoctoral research scientist who works in Hone's group at Columbia Engineering

  Later in this year, a graphene-coated LED that lasts longer and uses less energy than a typical LED is expected to enter the marketplace—the result of research at Britain’s University of Manchester. It’s not, though, a pure graphene light bulb.

what’s even more exciting, is that we can use graphene light to develop flexible and transparent smartphones and tablets. Graphene light will transform the chips in our computers and smartphones, so that they can process information with light, which mean it will be faster, in a more compact form, and with less energy consumption. This could happen very soon!