Abram Fjodorowitsch Joffe

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Abram Fjodorowitsch Joffe

Abram Fjodorowitsch Joffe ( Russian Абрам Фёдорович Иоффе ), also Ioffe , or Joffé ; (* October 17 . Jul / 29. October  1880 greg. In Romny , Poltava Governorate , Russian Empire , now Sumy , Ukraine ; †  14. October 1960 in Leningrad ) was a Soviet physicist . He is considered to be one of the founders of modern physics in Russia.

Life

Joffe, the son of a businessman, studied at the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg from 1897. After graduating in 1902, he went to Germany to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich to study with Conrad Röntgen until 1905 . In 1905 he received his doctorate summa cum laude at Röntgen , his dissertation was entitled Elastic Aftermath in Crystalline Quartz . He also dealt with the photoelectric effect and the deflection of cathode rays (electrons) in magnetic fields (both later the subject of his master's thesis). He was an assistant to Röntgen and received an offer from him to join his laboratory, but preferred to return to Saint Petersburg in 1906, where he completed his master’s thesis in 1913 and obtained his Russian doctorate at the Polytechnic Institute in 1915 ( The elastic and electrical properties of quartz ). In 1913 he received a professorship at the Polytechnic (and in 1914 also at the St. Petersburg State University) and founded his famous physics seminar in 1916, in which physicists from all over Petrograd took part. In 1919 he founded the Faculty of Physics and Mechanics at the Polytechnic Institute , of which he was dean until 1948. He also taught at other institutes in Petrograd, some of which he founded physics departments himself. He was involved in the establishment of the X-ray and Radiological Institute (1918), from whose physics department the Physikalisch-Technologische Institut (LPTI) Leningrad emerged, later the Joffe Institute (so named after his death). During the Second World War he was involved in setting up a radar system around Leningrad. He remained director of the LPTI until 1950, when he was ousted from office due to the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign: Joffe had converted to the Lutheran faith in 1911 in order to be able to marry his first wife, but was then suspected of cosmopolitanism because of his international contacts . His dismissal was due to the fact that in 1949 his colleague GI Latyshev received the Stalin Prize for work on gamma radiation , which later turned out to be falsified. Joffe was then director of the Institute for Semiconductor Physics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which he founded from 1952 to 1954 . In other cities of the Soviet Union, too, his initiative led to the establishment of physical-technical institutes in which laboratory work and teaching went hand in hand, for example in Tomsk , Sverdlovsk , Kharkov and Moscow (Institute for Chemical Physics of the Academy of Sciences).

Joffe's field of work was solid state physics , especially dielectrics and the physics of crystals. He later initiated research on semiconductors (which is why he is also called the father of Soviet semiconductor physics) and in nuclear physics (from 1932, where he entrusted the head of the department to Igor Kurchatov ). In experimental solid-state physics, he was one of the leading scientists in the Soviet Union. In 1924 he discovered the increase in the plasticity and strength of ion crystals when exposed to a solvent - today known as the Joffe effect . In 1911 he determined the electron charge independently of Robert Millikan , using a similar experimental method as Millikan, but the work was not published until 1913.

Joffe was considered a leading figure for generations of Soviet physicists, known as Papa Joffe . Joffe's students include Igor Kurchatov (head of the Soviet atomic bomb project ), Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Semjonow ( Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1956), Igor Tamm ( Nobel Prize in Physics 1958), Isaak Kikoin , Lev Landau (Nobel Prize in Physics 1962), Pyotr Kapiza ( Nobel Prize for Physics 1978), Lew Andrejewitsch Arzimowitsch , Juli Chariton , Abram Isaakowitsch Alichanow , Jakow Borissowitsch Seldowitsch , Jakow Frenkel and Schores Alfjorow (Nobel Prize for Physics 2000). Many of his students were involved in the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb project in the 1950s. Joffe was asked in the 1940s if he wanted to lead the atomic bomb project, but for reasons of age he decided not to do so and referred to his student Kurchatov.

Joffe had been a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since 1918 and a full member since 1920 , of which he was vice-president from 1926 to 1929 and from 1942 to 1945. In 1926 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

Since 1928 Joffe was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , from which he, however, resigned after the pogrom of 1938 with a letter of November 15, 1938. A meeting with Robert Rompe in 1956 led to a renewal of membership in the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin .

He had been a member of the Leopoldina since 1958 . In 1929 he became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1958 of the National Academy of Sciences of India and in 1959 a member of the Accademia dei Lincei . He received honorary doctorates from the University of California (1927), the University of Paris (1946) and the University of Bucharest (1948).

A Soviet research ship ( Akademik Ioffe ), the lunar crater Ioffe , the asteroid (5222) Ioffe and a street in the WISTA research and technology park in Berlin-Adlershof are named after him. A planned German-Russian research institute, which will, among other things, work on accelerator technology, is named after Röntgen and Joffe (2011).

Fonts

  • Encounters with physicists. Teubner 1967 (first in Russian 1962).
  • My life and work. (Russian, autobiography), Moscow, Leningrad 1933.
  • Basic concepts of modern physics. (Russian), Moscow, Leningrad 1949.
  • Lectures on molecular physics. (Russian), Petrograd 1919.
  • Physics course. (Russian), Moscow, Leningrad 1927.
  • Physics of Semiconductors. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1960 (first in Russian 1954, 2nd edition 1957).
  • Semiconductors in modern physics. (Russian), Moscow, Leningrad 1954.
  • Semiconductors and their application. (Russian), Moscow, Leningrad 1956.
  • Semiconductor thermocouples. Akademie Verlag 1957.
  • The physics of crystals. McGraw Hill 1928.
  • with X-ray electricity passage through crystals. Annalen der Physik, 4th part, Volume 72, 1923, pp. 461-500.
  • Sur la distribution spectrale de l'effet photoélectriquc dans l'oxyde cuivreux. Paris 1934.
  • Semi-conducteurs electriques. Paris 1935.

literature

Web links

Commons : Abram Ioffe  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Memories of Joffe von Léon Theremin ( Memento from May 11, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Biography of Joffe at the Joffe Institute
  3. ↑ Joffe's biography at pbs in the context of a portrait of Kurchatov
  4. ^ Paul R. Josephson: Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia . University of California Press, Berkeley 1991, ISBN 0-520-07482-3 , pp. 321 .
  5. ↑ biography of Joffe in pbs, loc. cit.
  6. ↑ To the planned Röntgen-Joffe Institute
personal data
SURNAME Joffe, Abram Fyodorowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Иоффе, Абрам Фёдорович (Russian); Ioffe, Abram Fjodorowitsch; Joffé, Abram Fyodorowitsch
BRIEF DESCRIPTION soviet physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Romny , Poltava Governorate
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1960
Place of death Leningrad