"It's the middle of the night here!" Alexey Yekimov's first reaction to hearing the news of his 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was reasonable enough: "I woke up," he says! In this call with the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith, made not long afterwards, Yekimov goes on to discuss the experiments he performed over forty years ago producing quantum effects in coloured glass. He explains how his experiments confirmed theories he had read about back in his student textbooks: "I still remember that picture," he recalls, "where there is a quantum well, and the levels of electrons, confined in that quantum well."
