Diode lasers may vie with LEDs for lighting supremacy

It’s not just BMW with laser headlights. But the higher efficiency is tempting.

Little research had been done on diode lasers for lighting because of a widespread assumption that human eyes would find laser-based white light unpleasant. It would comprise four extremely narrow-band wavelengths—blue, red, green, and yellow—and would be very different from sunlight, for example, which blends a wide spectrum of wavelengths with no gaps in between. Diode laser light is also ten times narrower than that emitted by LEDs