Dr Victor Burlakov and Professor Alain Goriely from Oxford, together with colleagues from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the University of Toronto have been working on the automated synthesis of photovoltaic-quality colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) using separate nucleation and growth stages. CQDs need to be of high quality and narrow size distribution for the next generation of efficient solar cells and optoelectronics. The researchers' work features on the cover of the latest edition of ACS Nano where they report the scalable and automated synthesis of CQDs using a flow reactor and create dots that are on par in quality and photovoltaic device performance with the best small-scale batch synthesized CQDs.