The lightbulb of the future?

Man 1: The gas in the middle of this is an argon gas.

Michael Kanellos: It might look like a refugee from a string of Christmas lights, but this tiny bulb from Luxim can put out as much light as a street light. Check it out.

Man 2: We've got a 400 watt bulb in this unit and our system will run about 250 watts.

Michael Kanellos: Here's how it works: Electrical energy delivered to a component called a puck.

Man 3: The puck acts like an electrical lens.

Michael Kanellos: The gases heat up, turn into a plasma, and give off light. A substantial portion of the energy gets turned into light rather than heat.

Tony McGettigan: How many of these will I need? When you answer, "Only one", they are like you have to be kidding me.

Michael Kanellos: Yeah, one per street light. Luxim gets about 140 lumens per watt. High end LEDs get around 170 lumens per watt. An ordinary light bulb gets about 15.

Tony McGettigan: Key advantages are that the energy is driven into the bulb without any electrodes. So you don't use any electrical connections to get the energy to the bulb.

In the middle of the chamber the plasma will be 6000 Kelvin temperature. It will be the same temperature as the surface of the sun, which is why the spectrum looks very similar to the spectrum of the sun arriving on Earth.

Michael Kanellos: Lighting is hot these days, mostly because engineers and companies have ignored energy efficiency until recently. A lot of LED companies have received funds. Luxim for instance has received around $40 million of VC funds. We don't know who will win, but it seems clear that the bulbs and streetlights you grew up with are going to change soon.