Three scientists won the chemistry prize for their work on quantum dots
Announcement of the Nobel Chemists’ Prize for Spectroscopy in Stockholm: Excitement from Bawendi
Nobody had thought you could make such small particles. But this year’s laureates succeeded,” said Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, during the announcement. “This achievement represents an important milestone in nanotechnology.”
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the Columbia University in New York City and the New York City based company Nanocrystals Technology will each get one third of the 11 million Swedish-krona.
Bawendi was contacted by phone early Wednesday morning and offered a stream of reactions. There is a bit of a scowl. Shocked. It was unexpected. And very honored.
The winner’s names were leaked to the Swedish media before the official announcement. But Bawendi said he’d been sound asleep, “so, no, I didn’t hear anything about it.”
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Now that producing quantum dots has become a fairly straightforward chemical process, they can find more applications, Murray says. Being able to tune how a particle interacts with light could help engineers to develop low-cost optical detectors and sensors — an important component of autonomous transport, for example. It is also possible to integrate quantum dots into materials with unique shapes, textures and densities.
On Monday, Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
The peace prize will be announced on Friday. The prize will be decided on October 9.
The prize money was raised 10% this year to 11 million kronor. In addition to the money and gold medal, winners of the prestigious prizes get diplomas and a statuette at the award ceremony.
The chemistry prize means Nobel season has reached its halfway stage. Every weekday there is an announcement for the literature, peace and economics prizes.
A committee for each prize then discusses candidates in a series of meetings throughout the year. After the process has ended, the committee presents one or more proposals to the full academy for a vote. The deliberations and nominees other than the winners are kept confidential for 50 years.
On Tuesday, the physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for producing the first split-second glimpse into the superfast world of spinning electrons.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences requires nominations one year in advance from thousands of professors and scholars around the world.
Tiny quantum dots win chemical Nobel: how a physicist helped to realise the idea of a small system for quantum computing to illuminate tumor tissue
These tiny particles have unique properties and are spreading their light from television screens and lamps. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that they could illuminate tumor tissue for a surgeon with their clear light.
“It’s an amazing result for the quantum-dot community,” says Mark Green, a physicist at King’s College London. “The theoretical frameworks provided by Brus and Ekimov were made into a reality with Bawendi’s seminal paper in 1993, from which this now-mature science sprung.”
Ekimov was first to report observing size-dependent light effects, in coloured glass doped with copper chloride particles, in 19811. Two years later, Brus described making quantum dots in a solution, while looking at semiconducting particles for solar-energy applications2. “It was Brus who made the link between semiconductors and particle size,” says Green. It would have been difficult to develop a materials system until Bawendi developed the chemistry.
“If you want every atom to count and to be able to do it in a scalable manner, then a chemist’s approach is a very valuable one,” says Christopher Murray, a chemist at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who was a PhD student working with Bawendi at the time and co-author of the 1993 paper. He says he was really happy to hear the news, having woken up oblivious to the controversy over the leak.
The concept of a platform for quantum computing aims to harness quantum phenomena so that they can perform calculations that wouldn’t be possible with ordinary computers. Researchers can fabricate devices with the properties of quantum dots on a silicon chip, and then manipulate the spin of individual electrons trapped in them. “Both types of quantum dots are small, and confinement of electrons in the quantum dots leads to quantized orbitals, like in atoms,” says Lieven Vandersypen, a physicist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The Russian-born Ekimov, the secretary-general of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Nobel Foundation: “Nobody wants to come to the Nobel Prize in person”
In late August, the Nobel Foundation announced that it would be inviting ambassadors from Russia and Belarus to the Nobel prize award ceremony in December. Days later, it reversed the decision, following an angry public reaction. When asked if the Russian-born Ekimov could accept his prize in person, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told the Press conference that they just follow the procedure of identifying the most important. The most important contributors to those findings have been identified.
