Think of chemistry and you probably imagine a lab filled with beakers and flasks, bubbling with colorful liquids in a variety of hues.  There’s an element of this in Will Tisdale’s chemical engineering lab, which overlooks a courtyard on the MIT campus dominated by a huge red modernist sculpture.  Here, his team mixes together chemicals and boils them in oxygen-free environments to make a substance called quantum dots.

But in the Tisdale lab, these dots are often just a means to an end.  On a dreary December afternoon, two lab members, Ferry Prins and Aaron Goodman, shined lasers on colorful quantum dots to explore how they share energy and electrons with a two-dimensional chemical called molybdenum disulfide. Full Article »