Creativity and Serendipity Light the Way to the Optimal LED

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics went to the inventors of the blue LED, which provides the basis for today's energy-efficient and environmentally benign light sources. According to the citation, the blue LED "allows white light to be created in a new way". But without the discoveries subsequently made by Professor Wolfgang Schnick's group in the Chemistry Department at LMU Munich, consumers would not have taken to the new "white" light. For Schnick and his colleagues "reinvented" warm white light.