Russian physicists have created a prototype of a lamp, similar in principle to a TV picture tube, possessing characteristics of reliability, durability and luminous intensity that have not been achieved by anyone else in the world. The "recipe" for its assembly and the first results of the check were presented in the Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology.
For a long time, ordinary incandescent lamps served as the main source of light in houses, whose first prototypes appeared at the end of the 19th century thanks to the experiments of Lodygin, Edison and other luminaries of science of that time. Only relatively recently have they begun to be replaced by alternative compact lighting sources, including LED and fluorescent emitters.
Despite their low energy consumption and relative durability, such lighting sources have a lot of disadvantages, starting with an unnatural spectrum of radiation and ending with the fact that their production or the lamps themselves contain mercury and other toxic substances. All this forces scientists and engineers to look for a replacement for them and "reinvent" existing types of light bulbs.
For example, four and three years ago, physicists from South Korea and the United States created special coatings and graphene filaments for a conventional incandescent lamp, which increased its efficiency hundreds of times and made it more economical than both types of "energy-saving" lamps.
According to the MIPT press service, Ozol and his colleagues at Phystech and the Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences managed to do something similar, radically improving the design of the so-called cathodoluminescent lamps.
Such lighting devices have existed for more than half a century, but they have received extremely limited distribution due to the fact that they were noticeably larger in size than their "competitors", turned on as slowly as fluorescent lamps, and were about twice as slow as LEDs in terms of energy efficiency.
These disadvantages are due to the fact that cathode lamps work on approximately the same principle as the picture tube of old televisions. In fact, they are a flask coated with a special phosphor substance. It glows when it is "bombarded" by electrons, which are emitted by the cathode, negatively charged electrode, or "electron beam gun".
In most such devices, negatively charged particles do not begin to leave the cathode immediately, but only after it warms up and reaches its operating temperature. For this reason, TV picture tubes and old cathode lamps do not turn on immediately, but after a few seconds.
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This problem can be solved by using the so-called field-emission cathodes, electrodes of a special device capable of "shooting" electrons in a cold state due to quantum tunneling.
Such "electron guns" were previously used to create vacuum tubes for the first primitive computers, as well as backlight systems for liquid crystal screens. Despite the efforts of scientists and engineers, they failed to make them durable, compact and cheap, which is why they gave way to transistors and LEDs.
“Our autocathode is built on conventional carbon. It works not just as a chemical, but as a structure: we have learned to create a structure out of carbon fibers that is not afraid of ion bombardment, gives a high emission current, is technologically advanced and cheap to manufacture. This is purely our know-how, there is no such technology anywhere else in the world,”said Evgeny Sheshin, professor at MIPT.
As the physicist notes, for this, scientists processed the tip of the cathode in such a way that it became like a kind of brush or comb, covered with many microprotrusions a fraction of a micron thick. They create an ultra-high electric field strength near the cathode surface, which knocks out electrons into the surrounding vacuum.
In addition, Russian researchers have created a compact power source for the cathode lamp, allowing it to be "squeezed" to the size of a conventional incandescent lamp or its LED counterpart. A similar lamp, as noted by scientists, consumes only 5.6 watts of energy, producing about the same amount of light as a 25 watt incandescent lamp.
In this respect, it is not inferior to either LED or conventional fluorescent lamps, but at the same time its durability and glow itself are not affected by the ambient temperature, it has a more natural spectrum and can work for more than 10 thousand hours.
In addition, these lamps do not contain imported components, do not require imported raw materials for the production and, in principle, can be produced at any domestic electric lamp factory. Scientists hope that their invention will help Russia completely abandon the use of mercury in the production of lighting devices.
