Toasting plastic cups of champagne, the UC Santa Barbara community celebrated Tuesday morning in a campus conference room as news spread that a university professor and globally-renowned researcher had won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Shuji Nakamura was honored Tuesday for the invention of laser diodes and light-emitting diodes, or LED lighting, which is an energy-efficient technology that some in the scientific community opine will eventually replace the lightbulb.

Nakamura shares the award with Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University and Nagoya University, Japan, and Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University.

Nakamura is the sixth faculty member at UCSB to have won a Nobel Prize since 1998. Three of the prizes have been awarded for physics, two for chemistry and one for economics. UCSB alumna Carol Greider received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In front of a room packed with journalists, colleagues and students, Nakamura admitted he had been sleeping when he received the phone call from the Nobel selection committee early Tuesday morning, announcing the award.

The 60-year-old has been a professor of materials at UCSB since 2000 and is also the research director of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center at the university.

Nakamura began research on blue light emitting diodes, or LEDs, in 1989. 

After the 1993 introduction of LEDs, an explosion of research occurred, he said, and applications began developing with the technology such as cell phone screens, LED televisions and lighting that used energy more efficiently.

Throughout the years, the technology Nakamura has worked on has been used in various applications, including displays, lighting, medicine, semi-conductors and Blu-Ray optical storage.

He holds more than 100 patents.

Nakamura said he hopes his contribution will help reduce energy use on a global scale and reduce global warming.

The technologies have also been used in developing countries without electricity grids because an LED lighting system can be connected to a small, rechargeable solar cell, which over time is cheaper than an oil-burning lighting alternative.

Nakamura said he “had no idea” that the LED lighting would end up gaining him a Nobel Prize when he first began working on the project in the early 1990s.

Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall read a statement from Chancellor Henry Yang who was in Hawaii for the dedication of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which UC is partnering with Caltech and other institutions from a handful of countries to build.

Yang recalled hearing another UCSB Nobel Laureate Herbert Kroemer describe seeing the bright blue LED light for the first time in 1994.

Kroemer had predicted that the technology would eventually replace Thomas Edison’s light bulb.

“We are not just talking about doing things better, but about doing things we never could before,” Kroemer said at the time.

“By making it possible to bring affordable, energy-efficient LED lighting to developing countries, Professor Nakamura has also made a tremendous humanitarian contribution to our world,” Yang said.

Rod Alferness, dean of UCSB’s College of Engineering, called Nakamura “our generous and very prolific colleague”

He said Nakamura and his fellow researchers had put in an enormous amount of work over the years, but eventually came up with an LED light that is 20 times more efficient than an incandescent bulb.

“When you realized that 25 percent of the energy expended in the world is in lighting, you see the enormous impact,” Alferness said.

Nakamura, who obtained three degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Tokushima in Japan, said that researchers are given freedom in America to explore and invent that is unprecedented elsewhere. 

“Everyone has a chance to live the American Dream,” he said, adding that’s not so in Japan, where people face more obstacles to achieve their dreams. “Here you can do anything … That’s a big difference. You have to work very hard here, but you can do it.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.