[photochemsyn]

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-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."