HomePage

Shuji Nakamura came to the UCSB Materials Department in 1999 by way of Nichia Chemical Ind., Ltd. and the University of Florida. He is widely recognized as the world pioneer in light emitters based on the wide-bandgap semiconductor gallium nitride (GaN) and its alloys with aluminum and indium. While at Nichia Chemical Industries (Tokushima, Japan) in the early 1990s, Nakamura single-handedly initiated the development of novel vapor-phase epitaxial growth techniques to obtain single-crystal GaN heteroepitaxial thin films with excellent structural and electrical properties.  Dr. Nakamura’s crowning achievement at Nichia was the GaN-based blue laser, which had long been considered the ‘holy grail’ of wide bandgap semiconductor research.  At UCSB, Professor Nakamura has continued to develop GaN thin-film technology, and his group also pursues bulk GaN crystal growth, a means of obtaining free-standing GaN substrates. The use of low-defect-density, single-crystal GaN substrates would lead to enormous benefits in GaN-based device performance, such as LEDs and lasers with unprecedented brightness, as well as high-frequency, high-power transistors with properties unachievable in today’s best GaAs- and InP-based devices. Dr. Nakamura has published more than 250 papers in his field and holds more than 100 patents.