TV-Tube Technology Builds an Efficient Light Bulb

Power-saving light-emitting diode (LED) lamps are fast reshaping illumination’s cost and energy landscape, with long service lifetimes and high output in lumens per watt (lm/W). But LEDs don’t have everything. For example, operating these devices in high-temperature environments can shorten their useful lives by up to a factor of three. And many inorganic-LED bulbs include a variety of so-called critical raw materials, such as gallium, indium and rare-earth elements, that could face supply bottlenecks in the future. Engineering researchers in Russia have now demonstrated a different lighting architecture that they believe gets around some of these problems—an architecture that rests on the same vintage technology that drove old cathode-ray-tube TV screens.