Quantum Dots Still Shining Strong 30 Years On

摘要

About 30 years ago in the former Soviet Union, Aleksey Ekimov, experimenting with semiconductor-doped glasses,~1 was seeking the help of theoretician Alexander Efros~2 to explain apparent color changes of what appeared to be tiny particles of variable sizes. At the same time, Louis Brus in the United States~(3,4) and Arnim Henglein in Germany~5 discovered striking color changes of II-VI semiconductor nanoparticles grown as aqueous colloidal suspensions, giving rise to the simple description of the band gap dependence on size that is now familiar to students the world over as the "Brus formula".~6 These publications are widely considered to be the inception ofwhat is nowthe flourishing field of quantum dots (QDs). Most of those early researchers, joined by their figurative academic "children" and "grandchildren" gathered in Paris inMay 2014 at a conference hosted by ESPCI, organized by Benoit Dubertret and Peter Reiss to celebrate 30 years of research on QDs.