The term “nanotechnology” still conjures up many popular cultural depictions related to science fiction, such as tiny robots from Star Trek, or the miniaturized people in Fantastic Voyage, who are able to cure disease inside the body of a patient. But nanoscale materials are very real to the scientists and engineers who work on them, and in the case of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots, beginning to be very real to the general public as well. In this article, we hope to address a few fundamental questions about quantum dots: What are they? What makes them so potentially transformative? How can they be useful?

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Materials Today (2011) 14(9), 382-387
doi: 10.1016/S1369-7021(11)70182-1