Adjunct appointments continue

Further increasing linkages between Australian and Chinese NanoNetwork partners in preparation for joint PhD supervision, Professor Cheng Peng has been appointed an Honorary Associate within the Department of Physics and Advanced Materials
at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

Professor Peng, from the Key Laboratory of Advanced Photonic and Electronic Materials at Nanjing University, has particular research strengths in wide bandgap semiconductor optoelectronics and will be assisting in the supervision of PhD student Mark Lockrey along with Professor Matthew Phillips and Dr Cuong Ton-That of UTS’ Institute for Nanoscale Technology.

This particular research collaboration will centre around producing superior performance light emitting diodes (LEDs). Nitride semiconductor based LED’s have the capacity to completely transform the lighting industry in the near future. They use significantly less energy than their less efficient counterparts which utilitise incandescent and fluorescence lighting technologies. Deployment of LED lights could provide an instant 10% reduction in the world's energy consumption, leading to a massive 100 billion dollar cost savings and a decrease in the global green house gas production by 250 million metric tons.

Whilst the superior performance of LEDs has already been established with current generation devices, performance still falls as usage currents increase to the levels generally required in typical household lighting applications. The origin of this problem is still unknown, but the UTS and Nanjing researchers hope to ‘shed some light’ on the issue.