Study of Light-Emitting Diodes

LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, are cheap, easy to purchase, and thus commonly used in physics instruction as indicators of electric current or as sources of light. In our opinion LEDs represent a unique piece of equipment that can be used to collect experimental evidence, and construct and test new ideas in almost every unit of a general physics course (and in many advanced courses) either as “black boxes” that allow students to study certain properties of a system of interest, as physical systems that allow students to learn an astonishing amount of physics that they usually do not encounter in a regular introductory physics course, and as non-traditional devices that allow students to construct concepts that are traditionally a part of a general physics course.