Moungi Bawendi (MIT), Louis Brus (Columbia University), and Alexei Ekimov (Nanocrystals Technology Inc) are to be awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday. The researchers' work harnessing quantum mechanics to tune the color of semiconductor crystals is included in a range of new technologies, including flexible electronics, LED lights, and TVs and other displays.
"This prize was very well deserved," says Peter Lodahl, a quantum physicist at the University of Copenhagen. "We can now design artificial atoms to have the optical properties we wish rather than relying on the optical properties offered by nature." Each laureate will receive an equal share of the 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million).
Composed of thousands or tens of thousands of atoms, quantum dots lie at the interface between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. When the electrons in semiconductor nanocrystals are excited by an external light source, they behave more similarly to those of a single atom. Because the electrons are confined by the potential energy at the quantum dot's boundaries, each is limited to discrete wavelengths, and the available energy states are quantized (see the article by Dan Gammon and Duncan Steel, Physics Today, October 2002, page 36). Quantum dots with diameters of 5–6 nm emit orange and red light, whereas 2–3 nm ones emit green and blue.
In 1979 at the S. I. Vavilov State Optical Institute in Saint Petersburg, USSR, Ekimov began studying silicate glass purposefully tinted with a little bit of copper chloride. He and Alexei Onushchenko measured the material's optical absorption and found that the smaller the CuCl nanocrystals that formed in the glass, the shorter the wavelength of light the material emitted.
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