What are semiconductor quantum dots?
Quantum dots are ordered collections of hundreds to thousands of semiconductor-type atoms. The electrons associated with a dot are confined to this small set of atoms. The electronic energy levels shift to form bands, with an energy gap between two bands of interest, the valence band and conduction band. Interestingly, the band gap is larger for smaller quantum dots. When there are lots of atoms, such as in a traditional semiconductor, the bandgap is not a function of size. The significance of this nanoproperty is that different size quantum dots will fluoresce in different colors.
