Brandeis Stories

By David Levin
March 5, 2026 • Science and Technology

To see new quantum technology at work, you won't need to visit a high-tech lab. A Costco will do.

Walk down the television aisle, and you'll see screens the size of dining room tables displaying impossibly vivid colors. Many of these images are made possible by tiny light-emitting components called “quantum dots,” sheets of nanocrystals each smaller than a virus.

Researchers like Brandeis’ Katie Shulenberger think the same technology could one day help power solar cells, produce cleaner fertilizer, and enable lasers tunable to any color.

In her lab, Shulenberger, assistant professor of chemistry at Brandeis, is looking at whether changes in the way light from these dots is measured by scientists could benefit expanded use at a commercial level.

“What I'm particularly interested in is how small changes in the structure at that surface impacts the function of each nanocrystal,” Shulenberger says.

Shulenberger says standard techniques for light measurement involve suspending the crystals in a fluid or spreading them thinly on a grid, then measuring their output individually. But her lab is taking a different approach. Instead of looking at each dot in isolation, she’s developed ways to study the performance of an entire sheet of dots at once, which is closer to the way they’d be used in a commercial setting.

If quantum dots become more efficient and easier to make, it could provide a massive leap over traditional LEDs. At the moment, each different color of LED requires custom materials and manufacturing techniques. Quantum dots, on the other hand, require only one material. To produce a new color, manufacturers just need to change the size of the crystal itself. A small crystal will glow blue; a large one, red—but the chemical makeup stays exactly the same.

Shulenerger’s work may also help generate better information about how quantum dots behave on an atomic level, which could improve the efficiency of the nanocrystals - and make them available for wider technological use. Right now, she notes, when electrical current goes through some forms of these dots, tiny defects along their edges limit the amount of light they can create and waste energy as heat. “We're talking about the bonds around one atom in a thousand," she says—but when multiplied over billions of crystals, those defects add up.

 “If we make small substitutions in bonds at the surface, small tweaks to what's happening there, how does that change the optical property that we see? How does that directly relate to getting light out more efficiently?” she said.

It may take some time to work out the kinks of these miniscule crystals, Shulenberger adds, but she’s bullish about their future. If they’re successful, they could transform fields as broad as display manufacturing to energy production—proving that tiny details could have a massive impact.