Reengineering Sunlight: Hunter McDaniel on Quantum Dots, Solar, and Scaling UbiQD

So now that we we understand a little bit of your, your story, your journey, kind of how it all came to be.

I want to get into the technology itself a little bit, but I'll keep it at a level where anybody listening can follow it.

And so let's just make this really simple.

You know, I'm sitting next to you on an airplane and ask you like, what does ubiquity actually make? Like, what do you, what do you tell me?

Well, we are the leading us manufacturer and technology developer of quantum dots.

So naturally I should explain what those are and I can do that and try to keep it in layman's terms.

You know, these are advanced materials that are useful in a handful of different applications involving light.

So quantum dot, it's two words.

Maybe start with the second word, dot.

That's just something very, very small.

A little speck of material, vanishingly small.

I like to give the analogy of a golf ball to the Earth is about the same size ratio as a quantum dot to a golf ball.

So imagine a golf ball sitting on the Earth and how big the Earth is.

And then imagine now that much smaller a quantum dot.

So these are particles on the order of a few nanometers, which is kind of hard to wrap your head around.

But when you get to that size regime, you start to squeeze the electron.

The electron has a characteristic size.

It's very small.

But when you have particles of semiconductor that are small enough, you start to squeeze that, which changes the energy levels, changes the properties.

And that's a quantum effect.

So that's where the quantum word comes and then dot.

And that tunability with size gives you a platform for being able to optimize your color.

And that's the property we tend to care about.

As you make the particles a little bit bigger, the color might become more red and deeper red, and then eventually into the infrared.

Or you make the particles smaller, it might become yellow, green, blue, or even ultraviolet.