CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers at the University of Illinois are developing panels of microcavity plasma lamps that may soon brighten peoples lives. The thin, lightweight panels could be used for residential and commercial lighting, and for certain types of biomedical applications.

Built of aluminum foil, sapphire and small amounts of gas, the panels are less than 1 millimeter thick, and can hang on a wall like picture frames, said Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U. of I., and corresponding author of a paper describing the microcavity plasma lamps in the June issue of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Like conventional fluorescent lights, microcavity plasma lamps are glow-discharges in which atoms of a gas are excited by electrons and radiate light. Unlike fluorescent lights, however, microcavity plasma lamps produce the plasma in microscopic pockets and require no ballast, reflector or heavy metal housing. The panels are lighter, brighter and more efficient than incandescent lights and are expected, with further engineering, to approach or surpass the efficiency of fluorescent lighting.

The plasma panels are also six times thinner than panels composed of light-emitting diodes, said Eden, who also is a researcher at the universitys Coordinated Science Laboratory and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory.

A plasma panel consists of a sandwich of two sheets of aluminum foil separated by a thin dielectric layer of clear aluminum oxide (sapphire). At the heart of each lamp is a small cavity, which penetrates the upper sheet of aluminum foil and the sapphire.

Each lamp is approximately the diameter of a human hair, said visiting research scientist Sung-Jin Park, lead author of the paper. We can pack an array of more than 250,000 lamps into a single panel.

Completing the panel assembly is a glass window 500 microns (0.5 millimeters) thick. The windows inner surface is coated with a phosphor f
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Contact: James E. Kloeppel
kloeppel@uiuc.edu
217-244-1073
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
4-Jun-2007