Nick Holonyak Jr. couldn’t care less about receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics — or any prize for that matter.

For him, his achievements are symbolized through what we see, how we communicate and how we solve some of our toughest challenges.

“I see some Nobel Prizes out there where I would not trade where I’ve been for where they’ve been, but that’s OK. … It’s not my prerogative to say anything. I had a lot of fun doing this,” he said.

The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of his historic invention: the visible LED, or light-emitting diode. And campus officials are moving to replace incandescent bulbs with this high-efficient light source, especially in locations where light is used for long periods of times.

Holonyak, 84, still mentors aspiring pioneers in the field; he is the John Bardeen endowed chair in electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University. He has an office at the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, near the North Quad but prefers to work out of his corner desk in his lab.

Directly north of that building is where Holonyak’s discovery — and his colleague’s advancements — will be on showcase for years to come. According to its early plans for the ECE building, half of the facility’s lighting will use LEDs.

So the state-of-the-art building will see a 20 percent reduction in lighting consumption because of energy-saving measures in which LED lights will be installed in all instructional space throughout the building, except the main auditorium and a teleconference room, according to early plans.

The ECE building, which is to be completed by August 2014, is just one example of how LEDs are becoming increasingly common in the commercial world, just as Holonyak predicted they would nearly 50 years ago.

In a 1963 issue of Reader’s Digest, he said LEDs would someday replace Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs.

“I told (the reporter) at that time, ‘As far as I’m concerned, since we’re just at the beginning of this, there is a lot more to do and there will be further progress to go further from the red, to the orange, to the yellow, to the green, to the blue and the visible spectrum,’” Holonyak said. “And I thought it would be only about 10 years or so to get the next part and the next part. I didn’t realize it would be 50 years, but I had told (the reporter) that we would get to white light. I just didn’t know it would take 50 years.”

Holonyak first developed the visible LED in 1962 while working at General Electric in Syracuse, N.Y. While other researchers had developed LEDs that emitted invisible infrared wavelengths, Holonyak found the recipe for the semiconductor alloy that would emit visible light. His semiconductor material — made from gallium, arsenic and phosphorus — was the perfect combination for electrons to flow through and emit red light when they fall into “holes” that cause a drop in the electron’s energy. Following in Holonyak’s footsteps, researchers have developed other semiconductors with different changes in electron energy, resulting in different wavelengths of light.

“These materials gave us the freedom to choose the corresponding color of light emitter,” said Russell Dupuis, a former student of Holonyak’s who teaches electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Because of these properties, LEDs only emit monochromatic light, which make them highly effective for usage with colored lights such as traffic lights. White light is achieved either through the combination of red, green, and blue LEDs, or through a luminescent phosphor coating that converts monochromatic light to more palatable colors.

This differs from an incandescent light bulb, which uses the flow of electrons to heat a filament until it glows. However, compared to LEDs, incandescents are power leeches.

Holonyak planted the seeds for his students, including Dupuis, who in 1977 developed a method that has become the leading tool in producing LEDs and semiconductor devices. But five years earlier, another student, George Craford, invented yellow and red LEDs, which expanded the potential of LEDs today.

The Holonyak seed has blossomed to a variety of nifty applications — including even the possibility of total control of lighting in a building from your computer.

“(In the future), you can have an application on your computer that has access to every light in your house,” said ECE professor John Dallesasse. “You will be able to basically control every individual piece of illumination in your house from your computer.”

Automobile manufacturers are also looking toward LED technology for future cars. Wolfgang Huhn, vice president of Audi, said the high variation of power control makes LED lighting ideal for headlamps.

These can be programmed in conjunction with GPS systems, and the width and length of light can be controlled based on the location of a car. So if you were to approach an intersection at night, the headlamps could extend the width of beams to illuminate crossing cars or pedestrians.

This is possible because users can control the LEDs’ level of illumination with ease, such as dimming rooms when they’re empty or brightening it when approaching an intersection.

But LEDs aren’t making their way into homes just yet. The initial investment is too great: A LED bulb package can range anywhere from $40 to $100, whereas incandescent bulb packages cost only a few dollars at the most.

But upfront costs are declining. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a recent survey of industry prices shows that the cost for warm white LED lights has fallen by almost half, from $36 per 1,000 lumens in 2009 to $18 in 2010. And experts say that price will continue to decline in the years ahead, making it possible for LED lighting in residential areas by the start of the next decade.

As production costs come down, technology continues to change. Holonyak said it will be much harder, however, to predict how LED lighting will be used in the future.

“If you asked (former professor of physics and two-time Nobel Prize winner John) Bardeen ‘Did you see all this coming?,’ he’d slowly shake his head. We knew that it was important, but he couldn’t see where it was going,” he said. “You can’t … nobody’s got that ability.”

Though the exact future of LEDs is up in the air, one thing’s certain: It’ll light up the future in such a way that can’t go unnoticed.