Sometimes the importance of the original discovery only becomes clear over several decades. Quantum dots have been in development for various technological uses

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) https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/quantum-dot-first-for-carbon-carbon-bond-photocatalysis/3007017.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/quantum-dot-first-for-ca... Pretty impressive stuff: > "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."