Boris Valerianowitsch Tschirikow

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Boris Valerianovič Tschirikov ( Russian Борис Валерианович Чириков , scientific transliteration Boris Valerianovič Čirikov , English transliteration Boris Chirikov; born June 6, 1928 in Orgorol , Russia ; † February 12, 2008 in Akademodok , was a Russian physician (mostly a theoretical) , Novosibirsk who dealt with nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory.

Boris Tschirikow

Life

Tschirikow grew up with his mother, a teacher and librarian, the father had left the family early. The family fled the famine in 1936 to Leningrad , from where they were evacuated to Krasnodar in 1942 during the siege of the city . There they lived under German occupation. Shortly after the liberation in 1944, his mother died of leukemia . From 1945 to 1952 he studied at the Lomonosov University in the Department of Physics and Technology, later the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MITP). He then continued at the Thermotechnical Laboratory (TTL), which later became part of the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), before joining Gersch Izkowitsch Budker's group in 1954 , which was involved in plasma physics and at LIPAN (part of what later became the Kurchatov Institute ) Accelerator physics. In 1958 he followed Budker to the Institute for Nuclear Physics (INP, now Budker Institute for Nuclear Physics ), which he founded in Akademgorodok south of Novosibirsk . He stayed there until his death. From 1959 he was also a professor at the Novosibirsk State University .

In 1983 he became a corresponding and in 1992 full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

He was married and has a daughter.

plant

Tschirikow was a pioneer both in the theory of the classical chaos of Hamiltonian dynamic systems and of quantum chaos . He started out as an experimental physicist, but soon turned to theory. His earliest work included the investigation (which stretched over five years) into the stability of relativistic electron beams in particle accelerators, which led to the construction of the Russian B-3 betatron. In 1959 he introduced the Chirikov criterion in a work on the explanation of the mysterious electron loss in plasma confinement in magnetic traps, which explains the occurrence of chaos (in this case in the chaotic diffusion of electrons) from the overlapping of nonlinear resonances . It has been confirmed in many areas (not least by Tschirikow), but has not yet been strictly proven mathematically. Andrei Kolmogorow , whose work with those of his pupil Vladimir Arnold revolutionized the field of mathematics around the same time, said after Tschirikov's seminar lecture in 1958, in which he presented this theory, these were the ideas of a “bold young man”.

A little later, Tschirikow was already using extensive computer simulations to study chaotic phenomena, e. B. in the explanation of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam paradox of weakly non-linear coupled oscillators 1965. He also examined the “ Tschirikow standard mapping ” in classical phase space , which occurs in many dynamic systems when considering the behavior in the vicinity of a fixed point, and their Quantum version (kicked rotator, a plane rotating movement driven by periodic impulses, "kicks"). While investigating the Kicked Rotator, he discovered the phenomenon of dynamic localization in quantum chaos. Tschirikow proved z. B. that the motion of Halley's comet is chaotic (1989) and also that the solutions of the classical homogeneous Yang-Mills equation are generally chaotic (in technical terms: typical, "generic" solutions have positive Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy) . Tschirikov's lectures and reviews (especially the article in Physics Reports 1979 cited below) were very influential in the development of chaos theory.

Many of the common terms of non-linear dynamics such as Arnold Diffusion, KAM theory , Kolmogorow-Sinai entropy , were coined by him. He also wrote works on philosophical aspects arising from chaos theory.

Fonts

  • with Giulio Casati (editor): Quantum Chaos: Between Order and Disorder, A Selection of Papers, Cambridge University Press 1995
  • with I Meshkov: Electromagnetic Field, 2 volumes (Russian), Novosibirsk, Nauka, 1987
  • A universal instability of many dimensional oscillator systems, Physics Reports, Vol. 52, 1979, p. 263.
  • with Casati, Guarneri, Dima Shepelyansky: Relevance of classical chaos in quantum mechanics: the hydrogen atom in a monochromatic field, Physics Reports, Vol. 154, 1987, pp. 77-123
  • Time dependent quantum systems, in Voros, Giannoni, Zinn-Justin (editors) "Chaos and quantum physics", Les Houches Lectures Vol. 52, 1989, Elsevier 1991
  • Particle dynamics in magnetic traps, in Kadomtsev (editor): Reviews in Plasma Physics, Vol. 13, 1987, pp. 1-92, Consultants Bureau, New York
  • with Izrailev, Shepelyansky: Dynamical stochasticity in classical and quantum mechanics, Soviet Scientific Reviews C, Vol. 2, 1981, p. 209, Harwood 1981
  • same: Quantum chaos: localization vs. ergodicity, Physica D, Vol. 33, 1988, p. 77
  • Research concerning the theory of nonlinear resonance and stochasticity, Preprint, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, 1969, CERN Translations 71-40

Web links

Notes and references

  1. Chirikov: Resonance processes in magnetic traps, At.Energ., Vol. 6, 1959, p. 630, English Journal Nuclear Energy, Part C, Vol. 1, 1960, p. 253.
  2. One of the earliest numerical experiments on chaos in 1955 in Los Alamos. Instead of the expected equal distribution of the energy to the different oscillator modes, as in equilibrium states of statistical mechanics, the system showed "paradoxical" behavior in that it returned to the initial state after a long time. This was discovered when the computer simulation was accidentally run overnight.