alt Hacker NewsBack at Caltech, one of the students realized that the only thing limiting the brightness of an LED was heat dissipation. So, he dipped an LED into liquid nitrogen, and cranked up the current. It got pretty bright before it melted.
Naturally, he realized that the clear plastic blob it was inside was an insulator. How to fix - he filed it down to the bare minimum that would hold it together. This time, it would light up a whole room!
Liquid nitrogen is all one needs to make bright LEDs.
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People dedome their LEDs regularly these days for a different colour tint and beam profile. I never considered what it did to the thermal profile.
> Back at Caltech, one of the students realized that the only thing limiting the brightness of an LED was heat dissipation
It takes studying at Caltech to realize semiconductors output are limited by their heat generation? I thought everyone knew this.
>... to make bright WHITEish LEDs.
While I'll readily admit to remembering nothing from her class, I took physical chemistry [πchem] from one of the co-inventors [2] of white LEDs. This is where my own limited fleshtelligence began searching for Heisenberg's god...
[πchem] e.g: how metals behave when struck with electron[-like thing]s)
[2] ONE of two known-methods, then
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But yes, once any process exists, it's usually only a matter of heat management to keep it working full wall-slam-ed-ly [ƒpu]
[ƒpu] which is why to run GPU fanspeeds high enough to keep <65°C – don't care about the noisiness if they'll then last forever; change your car's oil (and keep topped-up)