Quantum Colour Will Blow Your Mind
May 28, 2021
6 min read
How tech pioneer Jason Hartlove plans to use tiny particles to reshape the future of TV and beyond
Written by Adam Kovac
Illustration by Allan Matias
For Jason Hartlove, revolutionizing a part of the tech world started with a simple thought when he was a kid. It’s a thought many children have had, whether while watching a Saturday morning cartoon or while taking in a museum exhibit. It’s a thought that can come from a child’s innocent fascination with powerful things or the mysteries of the physical universe.
Namely, that thought was, lasers are really cool.
Hartlove, the president and CEO of Nanosys, came by that realization while watching his big brother pursue a master’s degree in physics at UCLA. It was the 1970s and the elder of the brothers Hartlove was working with some pretty awesome technology. His dedication was such that it earned him the nickname “Photon.” The love for physics and everything the science made possible left a major impression on the younger sibling.
“I was just going and seeing some of what he was doing in the laboratory. Seeing these pure colours of these laser beams and they had these almost magical properties. I had never seen anything like it – nobody had!” says Hartlove. “I just remember seeing this stuff and being in awe of it.”
Five decades later and that feeling still hasn’t left, even after a career that has since involved Hartlove in the development of several highly influential technological advances in the field of optics. While working for Hewlett-Packard Labs, he was the co-inventor of the now-ubiquitous optical mouse. Later, he worked on developing CMOS image sensor technology, which you likely have in your pocket at this very moment – it’s a mainstay in the cameras found on smartphones.
Now, Hartlove has turned that passion for the cutting edge to quantum dots. The name might sound like a futuristic candy, and the dots themselves do sound like something out of science fiction. Basically, a quantum dot is a itty bitty semiconductor, just a few nanometres in size (for scale, a DNA molecule is about 2.5 nanometres wide). Hit it with light and a quantum dot will glow. Put them together on a screen, and humans will be able to see colours they’ve never before seen in a football game without actually being in the stadium. Simply put, quantum dots are the next step in display technology and Nanosys is the company that is making it possible.
“We are really the only ones making quantum dots,” says Hartlove. “There’s a lot of companies who are in research mode, but over 98 per cent of the quantum dots that have ever been in the world in consumer products have come from either Nanosys or our licensed manufacturing partners.”
The dots are not exactly a new piece of tech, with the earliest work on them dating back to the 1980s. Hartlove first encountered them while working for Agilent Technologies in the early 2000s. A group at that company was working on lateral flow assay, which involves using microcavities to pull a liquid through a channel containing reagents. The technique allows for very precise measurements to be made on fluids like blood or urine, but it was one of the reagents that captured Hartlove’s imagination.
“Quantum dots, at that time, were new to me and they were being used, essentially, as a fluorescent marker. Because they’re so tiny and so bright, what you could do was attach them, for example, to a protein or an antigen.”
The applications for medical use, for example, were clear. But Hartlove saw greater possibilities in the vivid colours, something nobody else was clued into at the time. Quantum dot pioneer Dr. Louis Brus, a former chemist at the famed Bell Laboratories, has said that when he was working with them in the 90s, he had no idea they would find their way into displays in the future. That’s where Hartlove’s vision came in. Not that there weren’t obstacles in the way to bringing what he was imagining to market.
“They were extremely hard to synthesize, resulting in very, very expensive processes to make even micrograms of these things. There were heavy metals, which nobody wanted to deal with. And they were completely unstable, so there was no way these were useful in any kind of practical application.”
“When I came to Nanosys, we were still pretty much at that point. We couldn’t make them last outside the laboratory. They were somewhere around $1 million to synthesize a kilogram of these things. We were just basically nowhere in terms of stability.”
In the 13 years since, technology as a whole has come a long way. Amazon was among the first companies that saw the potential in what Nanosys was working on – as Hartlove notes, people would see products and order them, only to find the colours were all wrong when they received their goods.
“They were motivated to improve that customer experience. They used quantum dots on the Kindle Fire and that was the first application. From there, people in Hollywood could see the benefits of telling stories with a greater color gamut.”
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Samsung followed in 2015 and now the dots have found their way into numerous companies’ commercial products – in the advanced TV market, quantum dot screens make up 65 per of all products and up to 15 per cent of the television market as a whole.
That’s just scratching the surface of the technology’s potential. Like many scientists before him, Hartlove looks to fiction for inspiration. In his mind, the real future could look very similar to that found in Minority Report, with ultra-realistic screens providing real-time, interactive tactile experiences that will become a regular part of the average person’s day-to-day life.
For example, picture a storefront display that you saw the last time you went window shopping. A few years ago, that window might have only had a few mannequins dressed in the store’s wares. Now, you’ll find screens that customers can actually interact with. But, with few exceptions, those screens are low-resolution and cheap. That won’t be the case for much longer.
“What we’re working on is going to improve that and make those displays more lifelike, visceral and interactive.”
“It will be able to enrich your experience with whatever’s in that storefront window. Maybe it’ll show you in the clothes on display in that storefront window. You won’t even have to go into the store to get an idea of what those clothes will look like on you.”
It seems far fetched until you remember how far technology has come in so short a period of time. Hartlove first joined Nanosys, back when any commercial use of quantum dots seemed expensive, difficult and even dangerous, the year the first iPhone came to market. Now, it’s difficult to imagine a life without these gadgets.
Pardon the pun, but to Hartlove, the future is looking bright.
“It’s just breathtaking, really, for me. To see the fact that I walked into this company in 2008 and saw these little chemicals in vials and five years later we introduced our first product and here we are, eight years after that, there’s 50 million people who have this stuff in their homes. I don’t know of another time in history when there was ever such an ability to see rapid innovation happen and then proliferate so widely.”