Given that only the living qualify for a Nobel prize,
Given that leaks demonstrably occur,
Given human nature,
Given at most 3 can share a Nobel Prize,
It is not a question of "if" but "when" eventually a fourth wheel scientist risks being assassinated if consideration of topics for a prize leaks substantially beforehand. Perpetrators could include candidates, but also nationalists (for prestige) of any rank (civilians, national security employees, ...).
Perhaps a topic for a film school student? A bizarre cross between "Don't look up" and the French film "Le couperet", with elements of film noir.
To make it extra bizarre, have the invention be resurrection technology.
Defensive measures the Academy could take could include last minute randomized selection of the topic / breakthrough, probability weighted by dubious nature of death of deceased candidates. Although this risks an escalation where a candidate has larger numbers of random candidates for other discoveries or breakthroughs assassinated...
A quantum dot is like a prism made of electrons; the sizes can be adjusted so that the color emitted is different and their properties of semiconducting and so on are drastically different. “The discovery here is for actually purifying quantum effects to actually become materials you can touch.”
It looks like a stock photo, but colors that bright and pure at room temperature is not typical of a chemistry lab! They are quite lovely, IMHO, I absolutely love the spectral purity and brightness.
It depends a lot on what kind of chemistry lab one works in. Having worked at in fluorescence microscopy in my MSc, then at Canada's Nanotechnology Research Centre & at Xerox's Research Centre in Mississauga, and later working with liquid crystals at TU Eindhoven I've had the joy of seeing some incredible colour in the lab. There's so much information which can be encoded spectroscopically, which is one reason why nanoparticles make for such useful probes.
Tunisians all over the world are rejoicing haha. I don’t know if he considers himself to be Tunisian, but we’re all extremely proud of him nonetheless!
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus, Alexei I. Ekimov “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”
> quantum dots are semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size, having optical and electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles as a result of quantum mechanical effects (wikipedia)
why chemistry and not physics? how do they draw the line?
As a sample because I can't answer your question more broadly: Peter Higgs proposed the Higgs boson nearly 50 years before winning the Nobel Prize. Just the theory without confirmation wasn't enough. Then when the LHC detected it, he (along with an LHC scientist) won the Prize basically immediately.
Quantum dots have an increasing relevance to display technology, so it feels reasonable to look back and reward a discovery which was more important than it seemed at the time.
An important consideration is that Nobel prizes are for "great benefits to humankind", it usually means practical discoveries, and never theoretical work.
The world becoming more and more complex, the time span between the theoretical framework and the first experiments to the realization of something genuinely useful tends to become longer and longer. There are some fields where, with the time to become an expert plus the time for the discovery to become Nobel-worthy, it may become difficult to get a Nobel in a lifetime (so, at all).
Sometimes the importance of the original discovery only becomes clear over several decades. Quantum dots have been in development for various technological uses for a long time but there have been many breakthroughs in the past decade, e.g. (2017)
> "The researchers used cadmium–selenium dots 3nm in diameter to seamlessly replace iridium and ruthenium catalysts in five different bond forming reactions including β-alkylation and β-aminoalkylation. What’s more they needed orders of magnitude less catalyst than conventional metal ones. ‘We were pleasantly surprised by the level of performance by just substituting, without any optimisation, a very simple quantum dot into these reactions,’ says Krauss.
> "The dots have some other advantages: they are easy to synthesise, cheap and ‘you can tune the photophysical and redox properties of the catalyst just by changing the dots’ dimension’, Ceroni explains."
> Nobel's will provided for prizes to be awarded in recognition of discoveries made "during the preceding year". Early on, the awards usually recognised recent discoveries. However, some of those early discoveries were later discredited. For example, Johannes Fibiger was awarded the 1926 Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his purported discovery of a parasite that caused cancer. To avoid repeating this embarrassment, the awards increasingly recognised scientific discoveries that had withstood the test of time. According to Ralf Pettersson, former chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine, "the criterion 'the previous year' is interpreted by the Nobel Assembly as the year when the full impact of the discovery has become evident."
My own comment: Since there is a large queue of potential awardees, I suspect there is a preference for older scientists who might die soon since being alive is also a requirement for award.
Chandrasekhar got a Nobel in 1983 nominally for the white dwarf work he published in 1929. Of course, he did a LOT in between, changing fields every 10 years. There was always chatter that this hurt him due to the committee "not knowing what work to award." His uncle, the experimentalist C.V. Raman, won it a couple of years or so after the experimental results of the effect that bears his name.
