Receive free Nobel Prize updates
we will send you myFT Daily Digest Email summary of latest news Nobel Prize There is news every morning.
Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing “quantum dots,” tiny nanoparticles that have many applications in electronics, from displays to medical technology.
Moungi Bawendi of MIT, Louis Brus of Columbia University in New York and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology, a small US technology company, shared the 11 million Swedish krona ($1 million) prize.
Quantum dots are semiconductor materials a few nanometers (millions of millimeters) wide, whose properties, especially color, are affected by their extremely small size.
“These tiny particles have unique properties that can now spread light through television screens and LED lights. They catalyze chemical reactions,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its Nobel Prize speech. For example, it noted that their clear light could mark and illuminate tumor tissue for surgeons.
The trio began the research decades ago and ended up winning the prize. In the 1980s, Ekimov of the Vavilov State Institute of Optics in the Soviet Union and Bruce of Bell Labs in the United States worked independently and discovered that the color emitted by nanoparticles depends on their size. As they get smaller, they change from red to yellow and from green to blue.
Then in the 1990s, MIT’s Bawendi revolutionized the chemical production of quantum dots, developing particles suitable for practical applications.
By recognizing these advances in ultrasmall particle science, the chemistry prize announced Wednesday echoes the physics prize the day before, which was awarded to three researchers who discovered how to generate extremely short pulses of light.
The Chemistry Prize is the third of six Nobel Prizes to be announced this year. Two researchers were awarded medicine prizes on Monday for their discovery of mRNA vaccines. The winners in the fields of literature, peace and economics will be announced next week.
Svlook
