Alexey Ekimov facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Alexey Ekimov
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| Алексей Екимов | |
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Ekimov in 2023
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| Born | 1945 (age 79–80) |
| Education | Leningrad State University (BS) Ioffe Institute (PhD) |
| Known for | quantum dots confinement energy |
| Awards | USSR State Prize (1976) R. W. Wood Prize (2006) Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2023) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Chemical physics Nanomaterials |
| Institutions | Ioffe Institute Vavilov State Optical Institute |
| Thesis | Quantum Dimensional Phenomena in Semiconductor Microcrystals Russian: Квантовые размерные явления в полупроводниковых микрокристаллах (1989) |
Alexey Ekimov (born 1945) is a Russian scientist who studies tiny materials. He is famous for discovering something called quantum dots in 1981. These are super small semiconductor crystals. Because of this amazing discovery, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023.
About Alexey Ekimov
Early Life and School
Alexey Ekimov was born in Leningrad, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time. Today, this city is known as Saint Petersburg, Russia. He went to Leningrad State University and finished his physics degree in 1967. Later, he earned his PhD in physics from the Ioffe Institute in 1974.
Discovering Quantum Dots
After finishing school, Ekimov started working at the Vavilov State Optical Institute. He began studying special kinds of glass that had tiny semiconductor materials inside them. He noticed that when these glasses were heated and cooled, tiny crystals of copper chloride formed. These crystals made the glass appear blue. The smaller the crystals, the bluer the glass looked.
In 1981, Ekimov and his colleague Alexei A. Onushchenko made a big discovery. They found that these tiny crystals showed something called "quantum size effects." This means that because the crystals were so incredibly small, their properties changed in a special way. We now call these tiny crystals quantum dots.
During his time at the institute, Ekimov continued to study these tiny materials. He worked with another scientist, Alexander Efros, to develop the idea of quantum confinement. This idea explains how the small size of quantum dots traps electrons and changes their energy levels.
Since 1999, Alexey Ekimov has been living and working in the United States. He is a scientist for a company called Nanocrystals Technology, which is based in New York State.
Awards and Recognition
Alexey Ekimov has received several important awards for his scientific work.
- In 1975, he was given the USSR State Prize for his research on how electrons spin in semiconductors.
- In 2006, he shared the R. W. Wood Prize with Alexander Efros and Louis E. Brus. They received this award for finding nanocrystal quantum dots and for their early studies of how these dots behave with light and electricity.
- In 2023, Ekimov, along with Louis E. Brus and Moungi Bawendi, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were honored "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots."
