The 2023 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who worked to discover and develop quantum dots, used in LED lights and TV screens, as well as by surgeons when removing cancer tissue.
The 2023 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists who worked to discover and develop quantum dots, used in LED lights and TV screens, as well as by surgeons when removing cancer tissue.
Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov were lauded as “pioneers in the exploration of the nanoworld” by the Nobel committee for chemistry as it announced the prize in Swedish capital Stockholm on Wednesday.
“For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles. But this year’s laureates succeeded,” said Johan Aqvist, chair of the committee.
Heiner Linke, a member of the chemistry committee, explained at the announcement ceremony what made the laureates’ work so revolutionary.
“The core thing about quantum dots is that, just by changing their size… you change their properties, for example their color. This is completely unusual,” Linke said.
“If you imagine, for example, you want to dye T-shirts – a red one, a green one, a yellow one, a blue one. For each of these colors, you would use a different molecule. Different atoms in different constellations give you different colors – that’s what chemistry is all about,” he said.
But, thanks to the scientists’ work in nanotechnology, quantum dots allow us to “use precisely the same atoms in the same constellations and just change the size, how many of the atoms you have, and get new colors and new other properties.”
Bawendi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Brus, professor emeritus at Columbia University, are American. Ekimov is Russian and works for Nanocrystals Technology Inc., which is based in New York.
France-born Bawendi, got an early morning call from Stockholm breaking the news that he is one of the 2023 chemistry laureates.
