Thanks to a technological breakthrough that traditional light bulbs, believed to be going towards oblivion, could get a reprieve.

Incandescent lighting and its warm, known glow is well over a hundred years old, still surviving in homes worldwide. However, the scenario is changing at a quite fast pace as regulations focusing at improving energy efficiency have been planning to phase out the old bulbs to go for more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) and latest light-emitting diode bulbs (LEDs).

Commercially developed by Thomas Edison, Incandescent bulbs operate by heating a thin tungsten wire to temperatures of nearly 2,700 degrees Celsius. The hot wire emits what is called black body radiation, a quite wide light spectrum, proving a warm look and a faithful rendering of different colors in a scene.

However with these bulbs come along a major issue that over 95% of the energy going into the bulb gets wasted, mostly in the form of heat. This is the reason why more and more countries have banned them or is phasing out the inefficient technology. MIT and Purdue University have now probably discovered a way to change everything.

Researchers have reported their findings in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. They reported that the key is the creation of a two-stage process. In the first stage there is a conventional heated metal filament, having all its attendant losses. But, rather than letting the waste heat to dispel in the form of infrared radiation, the filament- surrounding secondary structures capture this radiation, reflecting it back to the filament for re-absorption and re-emission as a visible light.

The structures are kind of photonic crystal, composed of Earth-abundant elements and can be created using conventional material-deposition technology. The second move will bring a drastic change in how well conversion of light into electricity is done by the system.

Ognjen Ilic said that the approach has been named ‘light recycling’, by the team, as their material consumes the unwanted, useless wavelengths of energy, converting them into the desired visible light wavelengths. Marin Soljacic said, “It recycles the energy that would otherwise be wasted”.