NSF Graduate Research Fellow’s work on light contributes to nanodot breakthrough 

Published: 24 June 2025
Categories: National Science Foundation

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Americans spend a lot of time on their screens. The images on those screens are made of pixels — tiny dots that represent a single point of color. Scientists from Penn State, including NSF Graduate Research Fellow Nicholas Trainer, recently discovered a process that can make the images on phones, monitors and TVs even brighter.

The Penn State research shows that light emitted from 2D materials can be changed by embedding a second, very small (80,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair) 2D material inside them, called a nanodot. By controlling the size of the nanodot through a process called quantum confinement, scientists can change the color and frequency of the emitted light.

Credit: Nasim Alem, Penn State University

On the left is an illustration of the experimental setup from this study. Molybdenum diselenide nanodots, represented by red triangles, are embedded in tungsten diselenide and encapsulated by hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) on top and bottom. A focused electron beam, shown in green, in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is aimed at the structure. The emitted light is collected to generate an intensity map. On the upper right is a dark-field STEM image of the molybdenum diselenide nanodot embedded inside tungsten diselenide. The contour of the nanodot is marked by

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