Alexei Yekimov, at the Vavilov State Optical Institute in Leningrad, synthesizes in 1981 copper chloride nanocrystals so tiny — a few nanometers in diameter, barely a few dozen atoms — that their optical properties stop behaving according to the classical physics of materials and begin to be governed by quantum confinement effects: the color of light these particles absorb and emit depends directly on their exact size, not just their chemical composition, a phenomenon with no precedent in conventional materials chemistry. Louis Brus, at Bell Laboratories, independently discovers the same effect in 1983 in cadmium sulfide nanocrystals suspended in liquid, and provides much of the theoretical explanation of the quantum confinement phenomenon in these particles, later named "quantum dots". Moungi Bawendi, at MIT, develops in 1993 a chemical synthesis method that allows quantum dots to be produced with extraordinarily uniform size and sufficient crystalline quality for commercial applications, solving the main technical obstacle that had limited their practical use until then. Quantum dots become a widespread commercial technology in high-end television displays (QLED), tunable-spectrum LED lighting, and as precision fluorescent markers in biomedicine to guide surgeons in real time during the removal of tumor tissue.