A life in context
The person behind the prize
Bawendi grew up across several countries and earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago. After working with Louis Brus at Bell Laboratories, he built a research group at MIT. His career shows why a discovery needs a dependable recipe before it can become a useful material.
The contribution
In 1993, his group developed a method for growing quantum dots with closely controlled sizes and high quality. That control made their optical properties reproducible enough for practical applications.
The idea in plain language
A large piece of semiconductor has fairly predictable properties. Shrink it to a crystal only a few nanometres across and the space available to its electrons changes which energies are allowed.
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