Advancing Quantum Nanocrystal Production

Researchers at the University of Utah formed a startup company called Navillum Nanotechnologies to improve the way quantum nanocrystals are produced. Nanocrystals are a type of semiconductor that have many applications, including television screens, computer displays, solar panels, and lighting. The startup's innovative method for fabricating quantum dots and other types of semiconducting nanocrystals at the commercial scale can both save energy and produce renewable energy. Semiconducting nanocrystals can make solar panels up to 45 percent more efficient. When used in LCD displays, quantum dots can increase energy efficiency by up to 35 percent over existing display technologies and improve color quality by 50 percent.

Transcript

00:00:03 so nanocrystals are very tiny semiconductors they are typically in the 1 to 10 nanometer size range so if you have a penny for example diameter of that if you line up some nanoc crystals if you line them up in a row it would consist of around 4 million nanocrystals what jacine did or what what we developed is a method of how to synthesize them really in an atom by

00:00:27 adom fashion and this tunability really opens uh new avenues it it allows us to make better solar cells in the future um it should allow us to make better light emitting diodes so there's really this large range of of potential applications so naalum is a startup company that I started uh with my um Professor Dr Michael ble so it is based in my PhD

00:00:52 thesis our goal really is to help facilitate um companies who are trying to produce use nanocrystal based Technologies and push them into Market the assistance from the Lan Center uh was very beneficial for USC otherwise we would not know exactly where to start the lant inventure development center is an educational program where we bring business students with science and

00:01:17 engineering students and and law school students and we combine them with University faculty who have new inventions and work with the faculty to help them commercialize their Technologies so with navalon we met with the faculty inventors and they introduced us to the technology and at that time none of us involed it knew what Quantum nanoc crystals were and

00:01:34 then we entered it into one of the regional Department of energy clean tech uh competitions and we won that competition with that business fund and won $100,000 it was a very good experience for us because we got to meet with a venture capitalist and other um other startups who gave us really good advice on how to start our own company what we're really our goal is is to

00:01:56 really add value both to the students educational experience at the University but also Al add value to the university and the faculty and if we get lucky we start a company or two out of that