Could Quantum Dots Reduce the Cost of Indoor Farming?

By Sam Humphrey

Since The Space Age began in the 1960’s, leading scientists have believed that plants will someday be crucial for human space travel. Astronauts will need to be part-time farmers when they establish settlements on other planets. There’s just one problem: when we get to Mars, there will not be enough sunlight to grow crops.

Plants need light to grow, and when sunlight isn’t enough (like on Mars or on many indoor farms and greenhouses across the world), farmers’ only option is to use electric light fixtures, “grow lights”. Some indoor or greenhouse farmers use a mix of grow lights and sunlight, like in greenhouses that are outfitted with electric lights. This way, indoor farmers use cheap sunlight to grow plants, and only turn on the electric lights when absolutely necessary. But even this method has its downsides, including the costs of light fixtures and electricity. No matter what indoor and greenhouse farmers try, lighting costs remain expensive, making our food more expensive too.

Therefore, scientists and engineers across the world have been seeking ways to grow crops more efficiently with novel lighting technologies. One team of scientists from the University of Arizona has recently been testing quantum dots, to see if this microscopic technology could make it more efficient to grow food on Earth and on Mars.

Quantum dots are synthetic crystals that are only a few nanometers across, comparable in size to the width of a DNA strand. They are a relatively new technology, and their uses are still being explored. In the research team’s recently published paper, ‘Optimizing spectral quality with quantum dots to enhance crop yield in controlled environments’ they performed experiments to see whether quantum