Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov
Igor Kurchatov ( Russian Игорь Васильевич Курчатов , scientific transliteration Igor Vasil'evič Kurčatov , pronunciation: [ iˑɡərʲ vɐsiˑlʲjɪvʲɪʧʲ kʊrʧʲaˑtəf ] * December 30, 1902 . Jul / 12. January 1903 greg. In Simski Zavod , government Ufa , Russian Empire ; † February 7, 1960 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physicist and the head of the Soviet atomic bomb project . Since then he has been known as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb".
resume
Igor Kurchatov was born in a village in the Ufa Governorate, which today belongs to the city of Sim in the Russian Oblast of Chelyabinsk . He studied physics at the State University in Simferopol and shipbuilding Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd . In 1925 he switched to the physio-technical institute , where he researched various problems of radioactivity under Abram Joffe . His younger brother Boris also came there . From 1932 he received funds with which he could finance a team of nuclear researchers.
Lev Wladimirowitsch Myssowski , Kurtschatow and their colleagues built the first Soviet cyclotron .
After the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Kurchatov worked in the armaments industry. First he designed a protection device for ships against mines . Later he worked on improving the armor protection of the Soviet tanks .
In 1943 the Soviet secret service NKVD received a copy of a British secret report on the possibilities of nuclear weapons (the report of the MAUD commission ), which, despite the scarce resources during the war , led Stalin to initiate a Soviet nuclear weapons program. Stalin then recommended the then Foreign Minister Molotov to cooperate with Kurchatov. Kurchatov was eventually appointed director of the program. His brother Boris was one of his staff. The Soviet atomic bomb project was only given a relatively low priority at first until information from spy Klaus Fuchs and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki drew Stalin's attention to the atomic bomb. Stalin ordered Kurchatov to produce a bomb until 1948 and appointed the secret service chief Lavrenti Beria to direct the project. The entire project was then moved to the city of Sarov in Gorky Oblast (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast ) and renamed Arsamas-16 . The work of the team (which also included other prominent Soviet nuclear researchers such as Juli Borissowitsch Chariton , the scientific director of Arsamas, Jakow Seldowitsch and Andrei Sakharov ) was supported by scientific publications in the USA and information from Klaus Fuchs. Kurchatov and Beria (who questioned the information as deliberate misinformation) insisted on their own scientific research.
The first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949. Kurchatov then worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb program (1953). He later called for the peaceful use of nuclear technology and stepped up against further nuclear bomb tests. He made many important contributions to the theory of atomic nuclei, thermonuclear reactions and plasma physics.
Kurchatov died in Moscow in 1960 while he was talking to his friend Chariton on a park bench. His urn was buried on the Kremlin wall .
Honors
In 1957 he received the Lenin Prize . He was also awarded the Stalin Prize and the State Prize of the USSR four times (1942, 1949, 1951, 1954). He was a hero of socialist labor three times (1949, 1951, 1954).
His former institute is named after him ( Kurchatov Institute ). The Belojarsk Nuclear Power Plant got his name. The Russian side also named the newly discovered element 104 after him: Kurchatowium , but internationally rutherfordium prevailed. In 1971 the town of Kurchatov near the Kursk nuclear power plant (now Russia ) was named after him. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the previously secret city at the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site in Kazakhstan has also been named Kurchatov .
The Kurchatov Gold Medal , which has been awarded since 1962, is named in his honor. Mount Kurchatov and Pik Kurchatova in Antarctica also bear his name. The asteroid of the outer main belt (2352) Kurchatov is named after him, as is the lunar crater Kurchatov .
Trivia
- In 1964 a new chemical element with the ordinal number 104 (so-called transuranic elements ) was discovered in the United Institute for Nuclear Research near Dubna (near Moscow ). There, plutonium was bombarded with neon cores . Initially named Kurchatovium (Ku) according to suggestions from Soviet scientists and used in various countries. American researchers rejected the name for political reasons and in turn claimed the first evidence of the element, obtained by them in 1969. After a long-standing controversy about the naming of elements , the name Rutherfordium (Rf) did not prevail until 1997 .
- During the atomic bomb program, Kurchatov vowed that he would not trim his beard until the program was successfully completed. He wore the beard for the rest of his life, which gave him the nickname "The Beard".
literature
- Andreas Heinemann-Grüder: The Soviet atomic bomb. Westfälisches Dampfboot Verlag, Münster 1992, ISBN 3-924550-65-4
Web links
- Article Igor Kurchatov in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)
- Simone Schlindwein: Where Stalin's bomb ripened . Spiegel Online, November 19, 2009
Individual evidence
- ^ Lutz D. Schmadel : Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition. Ed .: Lutz D. Schmadel. 5th edition. Springer Verlag , Berlin , Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 978-3-540-29925-7 , pp. 186 (English, 992 pp., Link.springer.com [ONLINE; accessed on August 4, 2019] Original title: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names . First edition: Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg 1992): “1977 QA 3 . Discovered 1977 Aug. 22 by NS Chernykh at Nauchnyj. "
- ^ Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
- Jump up ↑ RC Barber, NN Greenwood, AZ Hrynkiewicz, YP Jeannin, M. Lefort, M. Sakai, I. Ulehla, AP Wapstra, DH Wilkinson: Discovery of the transfermium elements. Part II: Introduction to discovery profiles. Part III: Discovery profiles of the transfermium elements (Note: For Part I see Pure Appl. Chem. , Vol. 63, No. 6, pp. 879-886, 1991). In: Pure and Applied Chemistry. 65, 1993, pp. 1757-1814, doi : 10.1351 / pac199365081757 .
- ↑ GN Flerov, Yu.Ts. Oganesyan, Yu.V. Lobanov, VI Kuznetsov, VA Druin, VP Perelygin, KA Gavrilov, SP Tretiakova, VM Plotko: Synthesis and physical identification of the isotope of element 104 with mass number 260. In: Physics Letters. 13, 1964, pp. 73-75, doi : 10.1016 / 0031-9163 (64) 90313-0 .
personal data | |
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SURNAME | Kurchatov, Igor Wassiljewitsch |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Курчатов, Игорь Васильевич (Russian); Kurčatov, Igor Vasil'evič (scientific transliteration) |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | soviet physicist |
DATE OF BIRTH | January 12, 1903 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Simsky Sawod, Ufa Governorate , Russian Empire |
DATE OF DEATH | February 7, 1960 |
Place of death | Moscow |