2023-10-04 11:59:11
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three researchers working in the USA for the discovery and development of so-called quantum dots. Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov created important foundations for this area of nanotechnology in the 80s and 90s, as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday in Stockholm. Quantum dots are used, among other things, in modern screens, LED lamps and also in tumor surgery.
The structures, also known as artificial atoms, are tiny and have very unique physical properties. They are interesting for use in so-called optoelectronics, for example in displays, photovoltaic systems and quantum computers. Roughly speaking, a special feature is that electrons can only move to a very limited extent within the quantum dots. This makes many properties of the quantum dots dependent on their size. This makes the structures the ideal system for exploring fundamental quantum mechanical effects.
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Prize winner names sent out in advance via press release
The names of the three winners were accidentally included in a message sent to the Swedish media that morning several hours before the announcement. In response to a request from the German Press Agency in Stockholm, the academy’s spokeswoman said that no decision had yet been made about the prize winners. Members of the academy spoke to Swedish media about an oversight. It is a tradition at the Nobel Prizes that the winners in the individual categories are always kept strictly secret until they are officially announced.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the two US researchers Carolyn Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless and the Dane Morten Meldal for the development of bioorthogonal chemistry and click chemistry. The Nobel Prize is endowed with eleven million Swedish crowns (around 920,000 euros) and will be awarded on December 10th in Stockholm.
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At a glance: Nobel Prize winners from 1901 to 2023
This year’s Nobel Prize season started on Monday with the announcement of the winners for medicine. Former Biontech Vice President Katalin Karikó and US scientist Drew Weissman receive the prize for their basic research on mRNA technology, which led to the development of corona vaccines.
The prizewinners’ work contributed to “developing vaccines at an unprecedented pace to address one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the Nobel Committee announced on Monday in Stockholm with a view to the corona pandemic.
Published/Updated: Recommendations: 2 Published/Updated: Recommendations: 34 A comment from Joachim Müller-Jung Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 96 Hildegard Kaulen Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 28
The prize winners in the field of physics followed on Tuesday, including the Hungarian-Austrian physicist Ferenc Krausz, who researches in Munich. Together with the Frenchman Pierre Agostini and the French-Swedish scientist Anne L’Huillier, Krausz was honored for his research on the ultrafast movements of electrons.
The three physicists succeeded in generating “extremely short light pulses” in the attosecond range, which could be used to measure processes “in which electrons move or change their energy,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its statement. An attosecond is equal to a billionth part of a billionth of a second.
The Nobel Prize for Literature follows on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the award for economics on Monday.
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