Scientists share Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on tiny quantum dots

Stockholm: Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”, the award-giving body said on Wednesday.

Nanoparticles and quantum dots are used in LED lights and TV screens and can also be used to guide surgeons while removing cancer tissue.

The scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Credit: AP

Scientists Moungi Bawendi, 62, Louis Brus, 80, and Alexei Ekimov, 78, will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish krona ($1.5 million).

Ekimov and Brus are early pioneers of the technology, while Bawendi is credited with revolutionising the production of quantum dots “resulting in almost perfect particles. This high quality was necessary for them to be utilised in applications,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for awarding the prize.

Earlier on Wednesday, the academy appeared to have inadvertently published the names of the three scientists it said had been awarded this year’s chemistry prize.

From left: Professor Emeritus Louis Brus, Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Moungi Bawendi. Credit: AP

Swedish public broadcaster SVT said the academy had sent an early press release that contained the names of the scientists.

“There was a press release sent out for still unknown reasons. We have been very active this morning to find out exactly what happened,” Hans Ellegren, the secretary-general of the academy, told the news conference where the award was announced. “This is very unfortunate, we do regret what happened.”

According to SVT, the press release said the prize went to three scientists for the “discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”.

Bawendi told the news conference that he was “very surprised, sleepy, shocked, unexpected and very honoured”.

“The community realised the implications in the mid-’90s, that there could potentially be some real-world applications,” Bawendi said.

Asked about the leak, he said he didn’t know about the prize until he was called by the academy.

Professor Emeritus Louis Brus, 80, poses for a picture at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, after winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Credit: AP

Bawendi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brus is professor emeritus at Columbia University and Ekimov works for Nanocrystals Technology.

Brus was hired by AT&T Bell Labs in 1972 where he spent 23 years, devoting much of the time to studying nanocrystals.

Bawendi was born in Paris and grew up in France, Tunisia, and the US. Bawendi did his postdoctoral research under Brus then joined MIT in 1990 and became a professor in 1996.

Ekimov was born in the Soviet Union worked for the Vavilov State Optical Institute before moving to the United States. In 1999, Ekimov was named chief scientist at Nanocrystals Technology.

The third of this year’s crop of awards, the chemistry Nobel follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.

While the chemistry awards are sometimes overshadowed by the physics prize and its famous winners such as Albert Einstein, chemistry laureates include many scientific greats such as radioactivity pioneer Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, who also won the physics prize.

Reuters, AP