Let there be light! This is the motto of 2015, declared on the initiative of UNESCO and the United Nations for International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies. "Lighting technology is a major economic engine with the potential to cause a revolution in the 21st century similar to that caused by electronics in the past century", academician Alexander Petrov, president of the Bulgarian Union of Physicists says.

Day after the global initiative was launched in the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, on January 20 the campaign officially started in Bulgaria. The national program includes dozens of events separated in two main directions. The first, called "Optics and science of light" aims primarily at teachers and students. The purpose of the second- "Lighting technologies and applications" aims at making the Bulgarian society acquainted with the impact of light based technology in different spheres of our lives. Scientists expect that thanks to the LED (light-emitting diode) technology, consumption of electricity will greatly decrease. There are forecasts that consumption would be four times less in 2020. The application of modern lighting technologies also has significant environmental effect because of the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, Mercury pollution is also reduced as new lamps do not contain mercury.

"By 2020 there will be gradual reduction in energy costs for households, businesses and municipalities amounting to some 425 million euro, which is not a small sum for Bulgaria. This money will accelerate the development of the economy and create new jobs," says Professor Hristo Vassilev, representative of the Bulgarian lighting technology community.

In order to promote lighting technologies, organizers have planned to implement six demonstration projects.

"The first demonstration project is called ‘Energy, Light, Life,’” says Professor Vassilev. “The project aims at providing 1 million LED lamps, produced by Bulgarian companies, to poor families. This will make energy costs of households decline. The other project is called ‘Light protects property and people's lives.’ The project aims at a free installation of LED lighting in yards and areas where crime level is high.”

Bulgarian scientists have also contributed to the development of modern lighting technology. One of them is Professor Evgenia Vulcheva. Along with several other Bulgarians she worked in partnership with Japanese scientists who are Nobel Laureates in Physics for 2014. They have received the prize for the creation of a new type of lighting sources.

"We are dealing with the study of the properties of the materials used for the emitters where light is generated. These materials are artificially synthesized and come in crystalline form,” Professor Vulcheva says. “The achievement of the Japanese scientists is in the synthesis of high-quality material, they created as a result of 20-30 years of work. They created the first blue-emitting diodes. Previously red and green existed. This caused a boom in the global interest and researchers began to work on improving these materials in order to increase brightness and light intensity. The Japanese colleagues sent us their material for tests. The aim was to see if there were issues that could cause defects.”

English: Alexander Markov