A life in context
The person behind the prize
Brus earned his doctorate at Columbia University and later worked at Bell Laboratories before returning to Columbia as a professor. Investigating tiny semiconductor particles led him to a striking observation: a material’s behaviour could change simply because its particles grew larger.
The contribution
He demonstrated size-dependent quantum effects in particles suspended in liquid in the early 1980s. This showed that the effect was not restricted to particles trapped inside glass.
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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