Chemistry Nobel Prize for discovery and synthesis of quantum dots | DW News

The winners of the 2023 Nobel Chemistry Prize have just been announced in Sweden. U.S.-based scientists Mungi Bhavendi, Louis Bruce and Alexei Eskimov won the prestigious award for their work on tiny quantum dots. They will be awarded $1 million for their achievements. Swedish media outlets reported that the names of the winners were leaked several hours before the official announcement. The Nobel jury says that they deeply regret the leaks, which are rare given the great lengths undertaken to keep the winners' names under wraps. And for more, I'm joined from DW Science by reporter Derek Williams. So first of all, what is this? What is their science? What did they win for? Well, the Academy granted the prize for what it called the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, and said they planted an important seed for nanotechnology. So what are quantum dots, actually? Well, sometimes they're called artificial atoms, although they're actually much bigger than that. They're usually a couple of dozen atoms in diameter and can contain hundreds or thousands of them. But they're very, very, very tiny. They're way down in the nano range, which is where physics gets kind of weird. Now, in practical terms, what they've done in terms of revolutionizing the fields that they revolutionized, really it's optics. It's mostly about optics. Now, optics in terms of LED screens, for example, the quantum dots have made the colors that are emitted by LED screens much richer and also higher resolution. You can use them, for example, also in LEDs to change the quality of the light. They're used sometimes in that to turn a harsh light, for example, into a warm light. But they're also used or have the possibility to be used in, for example, future quantum computers in terms of encryption. There are plans to use them in solar cells, to optimize solar cells. There's even plans to use them in terms of surgery, so in health care, in order to track down, they can be used to track down, for example, diseased tissue. So they're really very widespread in terms of the fields that they're used in. And two of the researchers basically discovered the theory behind the quantum dots from each other independently back in the 80s. And the third revolutionized their production. So that's why they're receiving this particular prize. And it's interesting because, you know, there's a bit of a scandal in the announcement of their names now. We found out earlier than we should have, and this is highly, highly unusual. So Derek, what happened here? I've got no idea, but I know that the person who pressed send on that particular email is probably going to be in a lot of trouble. So what happened? The committee sent out an email. Sent an email to a Swedish newspaper, apparently. That's what happened. It's not completely clear yet exactly what happened. But one way or the other, it was reported on our Reuters feed just a couple of hours ago. So well in advance. Something that, in all the years that I've reported on the Nobel Prizes, has never happened before. There has been scandal involved in the Peace and the Literature Prize in the past. Sometimes there are mistakes that are made that the Nobel Committee has mistakenly called the wrong people in the past, who happen to have the same name as the researcher who's receiving the award. There have been mistakes in the past, but nothing quite this serious. Okay. And the announcement of the researchers themselves, I mean, was that a surprise? Were they? They weren't really in my top three. I was expecting something else, and most of the prediction sites that I looked at before in the run-up to this, as you always do when you're reporting on this, you look at what people are saying and what chemists themselves are saying, and they weren't really in the top three. But I think that that has to do with the fact that there are so many important areas of research that are worthy of a Nobel Prize, and this one, because it's really several decades back, has sort of slipped off people's radar. Okay. Derek Williams, DW science reporter, thank you so much for bringing us up to date.