Are you ready for the future? Back in 1869, Russia's Dmitri Mendeleev began to classify the elements according to their chemical properties, giving rise to the Periodical Table of Elements. "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper," Mendeleev recalled.
Fast forward 150 years to Israel where a team of scientists, led by Professor Uri Banin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Chemistry and Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, is reinventing the concept of the periodic table but for artificial atoms, otherwise known as colloidal quantum dots. The nanoscience research team developed a method that enables quantum dots to join together and form new molecular structures. Their findings were published in the latest edition of Nature Communications.
Quantum dots are nano-sized chunks of crystal, each containing hundreds to thousands of semiconductor atoms. When viewed through an electron microscope they look like dots. As with real atoms, when you combine artificial atoms together, they create a new (artificial) molecule with unique properties and characteristics. These molecules are referred to as "artificial" because they're not one of the 150 million original molecules that have been formed by combining atoms from the 118 known elements in our Periodic Table.
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