A tablet shows this year's laureates, U.S. chemist Moungi Bawendi, U.S. chemist Louis Brus and Russian physicist Alexei Ekimov, during the announcement of the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on October 4, 2023.
Since their initial discovery four decades ago, quantum dots have found their way into commercial products, most notably OLED television screens and in biomedical imaging. They have also been actively explored for their potential future applications to a wider array of technologies, including in the development of more efficient photovoltaic materials used for solar energy.
The science of quantum dots is based on the principle in quantum physics that fundamental particles such as electrons have wave-like properties at very small scales. When they are confined into volumes that are comparable in size to their wavelength, the energy they can release depends on the precise dimensions of the volume that contains them. That means an electron that is trapped inside a quantum dot will give off light of a specific frequency that depends on the size of the dot.
Then, in 1993, Dr. Bawendi at MIT pioneered a method for synthesizing quantum dots of specific size and high optical quality. This paved the way for a made-to-order nanomaterial that could be tested and applied to a range of situations. Wednesday’s announcement was unusual and a source of some embarrassment for officials because the names of the winners were revealed by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, apparently hours before the Nobel committee was to have reached its final decision on this year’s chemistry laureates.