A. Paul Alivisatos
Wolf Prize Laureate in Chemistry 2012
A. Paul Alivisatos
Affiliation at the time of the award:
Lawrence Berkley National Lab, Berkley, USA
Award citation:
“for developing the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties, and to utilizing their unique properties for applications ranging from light generation and harvesting to biological imaging.”
Prize share:
A. Paul Alivisatos
Charles M. Lieber
Prof. Paul Alivisatos (born 1959, USA) has developed the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties, and to utilizing their unique properties for applications ranging from light generation and harvesting to biological imaging.
He and his coworkers have developed methods for synthesizing nanocrystals and have elucidated the principles and scaling laws that underlie their development, so that high quality, defect-free colloidal inorganic nanoparticles of defined size and shape can now be made routinely in many laboratories around the world. He has shown how to prepare branched and hollow nanoparticles.
His colloidal nanocrystals have allowed him to study fundamental physics and chemistry of these “artificial atoms” in the novel and important size range between molecules and continuous solids. He has contributed to the spectroscopy of nanocrystals in the time domain and to the study of such photophysical phenomena as electron relaxation, electron-vibration coupling, single-photon emission, and single-electron charging. He has led in studying such phenomena as size dependent melting and pressure induced solid-solid phase transitions and in creating “artificial molecules”, where small numbers of colloidal nanoparticles are joined together into specific arrangements with controlled symmetry and connectivity.
He has demonstrated applications of inorganic nanocrystals in solid state lighting and in solar cells, and has developed methods for biological imaging, such as his “Plasmon ruler”‘ which measures the relative motion of two nanocrystals, joined by DNA or peptides.