What is the Nobel laureate from Russia Alexey Ekimov famous for?

October 4 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Munga J. Bawendi, Louis Brus and Russian native Alexei Ekimov. Details of the biography of a scientist from the Russian Federation are in the Kommersant material.

Ekimov Alexey Ivanovich was born on February 28, 1945. In 1967 he graduated from the Faculty of Physics of Leningrad State University (Department of Molecular Physics). In 1974 he defended his PhD thesis on the topic “Optical orientation of carrier spins in semiconductors”, in 1989 – his doctorate on the topic “Quantum dimensional phenomena in semiconductor microcrystals”.

In the 1970s, he participated in studies of the optical orientation of electron and nuclear spins in semiconductors. In the early 1980s, Alexei Ekimov succeeded in creating size-dependent quantum effects in colored glass.

He worked at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute and at the Vavilov State Optical Institute. Since 1999 he has lived and worked in the USA. He holds the position of chief scientist at the American company Nanocrystals Technology Inc.

He was a visiting professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, Claude Bernard University (France), the Max Planck Institute in Munich (Germany) and Osaka University (Japan).

He has written more than 100 scientific papers and is the author of several inventions. In 1976, he was awarded the USSR State Prize for a series of works “Detection and study of new phenomena associated with the optical orientation of the spins of electrons and nuclei in semiconductors.” In 2006, together with Alexander Efros and Louis Bruce, he received the Wood Prize for “the discovery of nanocrystalline quantum dots and pioneering studies of their electronic and optical properties.”