A gallium nitride revolution is promising everything from super small super fast computers to lights that will cut energy costs by 80 per cent and a University of Technology, Sydney researcher is working to ensure that all the promises come off.

Olaf Gelhausen from Germany this year won an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship to study at UTS on a project to pin down the properties and quirks of the new-generation gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor.

GaN is already being used in opto-electronics - GaN-based semiconductor diodes are the basic elements of blue, green and white LEDs, as well as violet laser diodes - but the revolution is only just gathering momentum according to Mr Gelhausen.

"It's the beginning of the end for the incandescent light bulb," Mr Gelhausen said. "GaN solid state lighting will last 10 years and cut energy costs by 80 per cent."

"GaN will be at the heart of the next generation of high-density DVDs and, among other things, will make possible movie theatre quality laser TVs and medical devices capable of detecting airborne pathogens like Anthrax spores.

"Moreover the magnetic properties of the material, allowing the spin of electrons to be controlled, promises to open the door to much faster and smaller microprocessors - what's being called quantum computing."

Working in the Microstructural Analysis Unit in the UTS Faculty of Science, Mr Gelhausen's PhD research is putting the material through exhaustive experiments to enable control of impurities and defects at the atomic scale and so provide manufacturers with the information they will need to produce high quality and reliable GaN devices.

"GaN technology is far from being considered mature, as opposed to silicon technology," he said. "It's predicted the GaN based device market will generate a turnover of US $3 billion by 2006, but to realise this potential manufacturers will need to be confident of producing low-defect devices at a marketable price."

Mr Gelhausen said he was attracted to UTS because of the unique combination of world-class equipment available in the Microstructural Analysis Unit and the presence of Dr Matthew Phillips, a leading expert in the field of nitride semiconductor research.