The 2023 Nobel prize in chemistry has gone to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for inventing quantum dots, which are being used in computing, lasers and microscopy
By Clare Wilson
4 October 2023
Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov have been awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry
Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Prize Outreach
The 2023 Nobel prize in chemistry has been given to three developers of quantum dots – particles so small that their electrical and optical properties are influenced by quantum physics.
Two of the winners are Louis Brus at Columbia University and Alexei Ekimov at Nanocrystals Technology, both in New York, who discovered the technology in the 1980s while working separately. The third winner is Moungi Bawendi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, who developed better techniques for making the dots, which are also known as semiconductor nanocrystals.
The crystals are made from compounds such as lead sulphide or cadmium selenide and are only a few nanometres in size – or about one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
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Because the crystals are so small, they have properties somewhere between individual atoms, which are governed by the laws of quantum physics, and ordinary larger pieces of material made from the same compounds.
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Within quantum dots, electrons can only occupy discrete energy levels, which means that if excited, they emit light at specific wavelengths, depending on the properties of the crystal.