Your new gaming monitor is so smart it just won a Nobel Prize
It's tempting to dismiss quantum dot screen technology as yet another checklist gimmick, something marketing stooges love but something that doesn't really add much to the actual viewing experience. Except it's just been awarded one of the highest accolades in all of science, a Nobel Prize.
More specifically, Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus, and Alexei I. Ekimov have been jointly award the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry «for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.»
In the context of screen tech, quantum dots are associated with more vibrant and accurate colours. Arguably, that benefit isn't always obvious, such is the ubiquity of late when it comes to seeing quantum dot tech in screen spec lists.
Certainly, the mere inclusion of quantum dot tech doesn't guarantee that a screen is going to be something special.
But that doesn't mean the underlying technology isn't still utterly fascinating and rather brilliant. It also turns out that quantum dots are being used for much more than just making the colours pop a little bit more in your favourite game.
So, what are quantum dots? In simple terms, tiny crystalline beads of material measuring a few tens of atoms across. To put their sizes into context, the scale of a quantum dot relates to a football in roughly the same proportion as the football does to the entire planet earth. So, yeah, they're small.
They need to be that small because they rely on the fact that quantum effects kick in when materials are reduced to such small scales. Put simply, size matters on the quantum scale.
It's all to do with the space available to electrons at that tiny scale and the wave-particle duality of electrons. The smaller the particle, the smaller the space available for the wave element
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