A bump worthy of a Nobel Prize – Nature Nanotechnology

Professor Louis Brus of Columbia University tells Nature Nanotechnology about his first encounter with the world of colloidal quantum dots, the beginning of a journey that has earned him this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Aleksey Yekimov and Moungi Bawendi). He also offers insightful advice to young scientists along the way.

I’d like to start with your motivation in pursuing the kind of measurements you were doing before you discovered the size effect in quantum dots. What were you studying in 1982 when you first saw some anomalous behaviour in the absorption spectra of your colloids?