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Published online 10 June 2009 | Nature 459, 760-761 (2009) | doi:10.1038/459760a
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Quantum dots go large
A small industry could be on the verge of a boom, reports Katharine Sanderson.
Nanocrystals called quantum dots have promised to revolutionize display technologies, solar power and biological imaging for more than a decade. Yet the quantum-dot market has remained small, with a handful of companies selling dots directly to researchers, using the particles to develop their own products or licensing their technologies to partners.
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The problem that this industry will have in future is Cadmium itself used for biological and Lead used for solar power applications of nanoparticles! Due to the overall increase of environmental friendly production processes it is difficult to place that these heavy and toxic metals are used for the common run of mankind. The mentioned highly cited and recommended article of Bawendi and co-workers all started the increase in research of the mentioned topic but also started the development of non-pyrophoric precursors to replace alkyl-cadmium compounds in order to prevent the labs of burning to the ground, especially in scale-up syntheses. The practical problems are the photobrightening effect (Quantum Dots increase their quantum yield [QY] when excited to a synthesis process dependend maximum), blinking statistics (single molecule behavior, statistical on/off of the exciton recombination), any kind of defects and their role in non-radiative decay processes (decrease of QY), and last but not least the waste disposal and recycling of the mostly used toxic heavy metals. I am not surprised that the stock markets took that long to put the eyes on rarely available companies despite the fact that the QDot Corp. (now part of Invitrogen) released their first product about seven years ago. The owners of QDot travelled the world -even years before the product was released- and told anybody that this field of research is exhausted, without a complete basic research on any chemical or physical behavior. All the other researchers of this field were asked: "What are you still investigating? You can buy it!" But thats not an argument for a product as anyone knows. It was just glowing like a rainbow and everybody liked it without asking questions. Citation: "But Amanda Chatten, who is developing solar concentrators at Imperial College London, says that she struggles to buy quantum dots that perform efficiently." (q.e.d.)