Alexander Efros

Alexander L. Efros is a Russian-American theoretical physicist, a co-discoverer of the quantum-confinement physics of semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots. In 1982, working in Leningrad, he published a foundational theory explaining how confining electrons in these tiny crystals produces size-dependent optical properties, work that underpinned the field later recognized by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has long been a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. His personal religious or ethnic background is not documented in available biographical sources.