A life in context
The person behind the prize
Yekimov trained as a physicist in the Soviet Union and received his doctorate at the Ioffe institute. His study of coloured glass connected a familiar material with unfamiliar quantum behaviour. He later worked in the United States on semiconductor nanocrystals.
The contribution
In the early 1980s, he showed that the colour of glass containing tiny copper chloride crystals depended on the crystals’ size. Their composition alone could not explain the changing colours.
The idea in plain language
A large piece of semiconductor has fairly predictable properties. Shrink it to a crystal only a few nanometres across and the space available to its electrons changes which energies are allowed.
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